Team Adventure Learning
Update Autumn 1 2015
Welcome back
We hope you have had a restful and relaxing break and enjoyed the summer weather when we had
it! We are delighted to welcome the Year 3 children to Team Adventure and to welcome back those
children in Year 4. The children are settling in well to their new classes and we are now looking
forward to having lots of fun as we learn and aim high together.
We would like to welcome Tim Houghton to Team Adventure and Lucy Pells to the school teaching
staff. We are also fortunate to have Lisa Moore in Island class who will be teaching 2 days a week.
The children have already done a fabulous job of welcoming them to our school and team.
Staff
Teaching staff
Secret Garden Mr Houghton and Miss Kinghorn
Ocean Miss Bedi
Island Miss Pells and Mrs Moore
Support Staff
Mrs Hall
Miss Kinsman
Miss Ireland
Parents and Staff working together
Learning packs
Learning packs will come home on Thursdays. They will need to be returned to school two weeks
later and then will return home again a week after that. The first time you will receive them is
Thursday 17th September and these should be returned on 1st October. Full dates will be enclosed
in the Learning pack.
In order to keep this learning manageable you will find one English and one Maths activity each
time which we will expect each child to complete. Each class teacher will keep further and
extension activities in their classrooms and if you would like to complete additional activities then
your child will be free to take these too.
Parent Teacher Consultations (PTCs): 21st September
This is a great opportunity to meet your child’s class teacher and we will look at how you can use
the learning pack to support your child. It is also an opportunity for you to tell us about your child’s
strengths and aspirations as learners.
Maths in Class (MIC) Every Monday 8:50-9:10
We are continuing with MIC this year as we found it to be very successful and the children loved it!
This is a time in the week that children do some quick fire maths activities with parents and focus
on mental maths objectives. We would love you to come along and share these learning
opportunities with your child at this time.
Ongoing support
The staff in Team Adventure are here to support you too. If you want to help your child at home
but are unsure about a calculation method or want to help them with their writing but aren’t sure
where to start then please come and ask us. No question is too daft, we promise!
Home learning board
We want to encourage the children to learn at home with you. This might be reading, practising
spellings, completing learning packs and H2H projects or something else that you are doing as a
family that children can learn from. We have an entire display that we want to fill with evidence of
your children’s home learning. So, if your child
works hard to practise their spellings one week let
us know and we will photocopy it. Or, if you take a
trip to Windsor castle, or you catch your child
sitting on the sofa absorbed in a book, take a photo
of it and bring it in! If you don’t have a printer at
home you can email it to the school at
[email protected]. Please help us fill this
display!
PE
PE is an important part of your child’s curriculum, not least because instilling a love of sport and
activity in them now can set them up with healthy habits for life. We are fortunate to have Adam
and his team coaching with us, and each class will have one PE lesson with them each week.
Children will also have a PE lesson taught by either their class teacher or a specialist coach, and
each Team Adventure class will have had this opportunity across the year.
It is therefore absolutely vital that your child has their PE kit in school every day and we appreciate
your help with this. The days your child has PE are as follows:
Island
Ocean
Secret Garden
Thursday and Friday
Monday and Thursday
Monday and Wednesday
Berkshire Maestros
This year your child will learn the violin, viola or cello every Tuesday afternoon. It will cost £30 to
hire an instrument for the year which will allow your child to bring the instrument home to
practise. We would strongly encourage you to do this. Further details will follow separately.
Experienceology
In true Experienceology style the children used the Wonderscope to find out what they would like
to learn about this term. The children asked many interesting and inquisitive questions using a
pictorial stimulus. They are curious about the Stone Age era, where and when they lived, what they
did and why they are so significant to us today.
The children will be investigating the Stone Age by researching the era they came from,
understanding what they did and what items we still use that they first discovered. They are very
excited to find out about their habitats and compare them to modern day living.
When looking at this picture, children thought of many interesting questions we hope to now
explore. Here are just some of them:

Who are these people?

What are they wearing?

What are the people doing with the tools?

When did they live?

How did they hunt their food?
English
Secret Garden
We will begin this year by looking at poetry, a very creative and expressive way for us to get stuck
into English. The children will get the opportunity to experience a number of different poem forms,
such as, acrostic, rhyming couplet, free verse, shape and feeling poetry. Secret Garden will be
linking their poetry to the Stone Age era. The poems will express their understanding of what it was
like to live in that time and how the people felt. They shall also learn to use several poetic devices
such as similes, metaphors, adjectives and shape. They will take all this learning and use it to create
their own poems about the Stone Age. The children will then get to perform their poems to the
rest of the class. Performing and presenting is a very important area of poetry, the children will
record their performance and then in partners give themselves a star and a wish to see how they
can improve.
Ocean
Poetry is always an interesting way to start the term off in English as it helps the children look out
for several poetic devices which they use throughout the year. The children will be reading and
investigating all about the Stone Age and then applying this information into a poem. We will be
looking at feeling and shape poems to help the children become a person from that era. Ocean
Class will also be reading and writing narrative poetry which is an excellent way to tell a story,
which often contains rhyme and are easy to pass on. The children will be looking at a range of
poetic devices to extend their poetry writing skills such as metaphors, alliterations, rhyme,
personification and similes. In addition to this the children will be performing a range of poems as it
helps them understand the different devices used by poets. They will then be creating their own
poems using inspiration from the range of poetry we have looked at. Poetry requires lots of detail
and description so it is important for the children to drop in detail and do lots of red hat thinking
and explain how they are feeling.
If any parents are keen to read poetry to the class please get in touch with us!
Island
This term in Island class we will be looking at poetry. This is a really great genre to get the children
to re-focus after a long summer break! They will have many different opportunities to explore
different language patterns and rhythm and listen to a range of spoken poetry to really understand
the structure of how good poetry is written. We will be linking this closely with our
Experienceology theme of The Stone Age, looking at different stories and characters and how we
can use these stimuli to create descriptive poetry. Language is so important in writing a good
poem, and we will therefore be looking at different poetic devices such as alliteration, adverbs and
onomatopoeia. Here is how you may use these features in a sentence:
Alliteration- A group of words used together that begin with the same sound.
The cunning cave man cautiously crept up on his catch.
Adverbs- A word that is used to give more information about the verb (action word)
Quickly, the cave man jumped onto the rocks and waited silently for his prey.
Onomatopoeia- A word that sounds like the thing they describe.
CRASH! The booming boulder smashed into a thousand pieces!
Examples of the types of poetry Team Adventure will be looking at
A narrative poem
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.
Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.
By Samuel Taylor
An Acrostic poem:
In Acrostic poems, the first letters of each line are
aligned vertically to form a word.
The word often is the subject of the poem.
e.g.
Elegantly and efficiently shaped
Good to eat
Great fun to find at Easter
Smooth shelled
An Alphabet poem:
Each line begins with the letters of the alphabet in order.
e.g.
A young girl was busy working on her project for school
But suddenly she had a question.
Could this be her lucky day?
Deciding to find out, she
Entered her garden and
Found hundreds of green shamrocks waiting for her.
Rhyming couplets:
Can you spot the pairs of rhyming words in this poem
(it is only the beginning of the poem)?
My Brother Bert
Pets are the Hobby of my brother Bert.
He used to go to school with a Mouse in his shirt.
His Hobby it grew, as some hobbies will,
And grew and GREW and GREW until –
Oh don’t breathe a word, pretend you haven’t heard.
A simply appalling thing has occurred –
The very thought makes me iller and iller:
Bert’s brought home a giant gorilla!
Ted Hughes
A poem with rhyme
The fairies by William Allingham
Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We daren't go a-hunting
For fear of little men;
Wee folk, good folk,
Trooping all together;
Green jacket, red cap,
And white owl's feather!
Free verse:
In free verse the poet is free to structure
the poem however they wish, it does
not need to follow a pattern of beats or
rhyme
My Brother
My brother is loud.
His shouts bounce off the walls
like gunshots.
If he was in a strip cartoon
his words would be
in big block capitals
all the time.
He makes everybody else sound quiet.
He’s the only person I know
who can speak in a
deafening whisper.
Gus Grenfell
Maths
Miss Bedi’s group
This term we are going to start off by looking at number and familiarising ourselves with different
mathematical operations such as addition and subtraction. We will be looking at place value in
100s, 1000s and beyond, and ordering and sequencing numbers. Some children will use
partitioning to solve addition calculations and number lines to solve subtraction calculations but I
hope that many children will gain confidence in using the formal column methods that you will
recognise from when you were at school. Additionally we will be solving two-step number
problems and understanding what operation to use. Children will take their learning into their own
hands by choosing which operation they need to use and the steps required to find the answer.
How to use the column method:
Here is another example of using the column method when the
T
U
3
5
units go over 9.
+
2
4
T
U
5
9
5
8
When using the column method it is
+
1
7
important to always add the units first
7
5
1
so 5+4 then add the tens.
Again you would always start with the units; 8+7 =15 which has
gone into the tens so you would write the 5 but carry the 10 over. It
is important to explain to children that it is 10 not 1 so they
understand the value of the number. Next you add the tens so 50 +
10 and not forgetting the other 10 you have carried over so
50+10+10=70
Mr Houghton’s group
This term we shall be learning about place value and looking at the value of each digit in a number.
For example: In 286, the 2 is worth two hundred, the 8 is worth eighty and the 6 is six. We shall
cover 10 more and less of a number and 100 more and less, also, ordering and sequencing
numbers. We shall then cover addition using number lines, partitioning and the formal column
method. The children will then learn to count backwards and find the difference between two
numbers, using a variety of methods. The class will be using these methods with measure, shape
and money. To make this learning as hands on as possible we will be using a wide range of
resources such as large foam dice, Diennes, chalking and computing. It is highly important to focus
on mental maths skills, such as, greater than/less than, missing number, number bonds and
counting in sets.
Miss Pells’ and Mrs Moore’s group
This term we will be focusing on place value and number. The children will already have secured
their knowledge of some place value concepts and these will be important to use to build on for
the next steps of their learning. It will be important that the children can recall different amounts
of tens and ones in any given number up to 100 and use these to compare and order using more
than and less than (<, >)
Eg:
55= 5 tens, 5 ones
98= 9 tens, 8 ones
55<98
From this we will progress by understanding the value of 3 digit numbers (hundreds, tens and ones)
and solving a range of problems involving these ideas. The learning pack will reflect what we have
been learning in class, so please ensure you take time to complete the activities with your child.
We will be solving different problems in a range of different maths concepts involving measure and
shape to ensure the children continue to build on their broader maths skills more regularly. It is so
important for the children to take the skills that they learn and apply it to real life problems. Please
look out in the learning pack for different activities to develop these skills. Mental maths plays a
large part in being able to solve many number problems including calculations and we will continue
to have a large focus on these across Team Adventure. Any opportunity to practise times tables in
different orders and within a context will be really beneficial for your child.
Here are some pictures of the children enjoying their first week back and getting stuck into their
learning!
Many thanks for your support
Miss Bedi- Team leader
Mr Houghton
Miss Pells
Mrs Moore