Meet our Teachers!
In Swifts we love to read, and these are some examples of our key authors that year 3, 4, and 5 will be exploring:
WELCOME
Welcome to our wonderful class, we are Swifts! We are passionate about learning and love to learn new things. With our teacher, Miss Taylor, and our wonderful Teaching Assistants, Miss Lewis, and Mr Derrer, we have as much fun as we can, and work our socks off!
We have a class full of kind, caring and funny children who always try to make other children in the school feel happy. As a class, we are very generous and love to be creative in all our work. One of our favourite subjects is art! Respect is a big theme within our class, and we show respect to each other, our teachers, and the school.
Our class theme is the environment, focusing particularly on looking after endangered animals. We have recently adopted a wild snow leopard named Bingo, who we are going to be learning about and supporting over the next year. We also explore the environment through forest school (which is our favourite part of the week), where we learn, how to make sustainable decorations, gardening, feeding the birds and responsibly use nature to create dens, safe fires, and art.
Swifts class love sport and PE and attend a lot of festivals and competitions within the Wyre Forest with Mr Derrer. This encourages; health and fitness, learning new skills, sportsmanship and respect for other players and schools.
OUR CURRICULUM
Through our topic sessions we become experts of that field, activating, and developing knowledge to become athletes, historians, geographers, scientists, artists and writers. We then use our knowledge across all subjects which helps to link the learning so we can use it in our daily lives.
This is Me: We are launching into September with the topic focusing on our fears and feelings and how we navigate these. We will also be looking at effective learning behaviours by using silent signals, wonderful walking, and showing we are ready to learn.
My place, My Time: We will be learning about hills and mountains, with a focus on geography. By using the resource of the hills and mountains around us, we will explore the formations, features, and history of the hills and mountains. Following this, we shall delve into the wonders of Ancient Greece. We shall be exploring their way of life, beliefs, settlements and how they lived day to day.
Around the World: We shall be returning to our geography topic of mountains and extending into volcanoes and earthquakes with a geographical focus on South America. Through exploring how they are formed, the impact they have and their features, we shall gain an understanding of more of the world around us.
Those who came before us: A historical focus. Jumping back in time to the Ancient Mayans, we will be exploring how Mayan’s built their homes, pyramids, and towns as we are focusing in on settlements. We shall delve into the reasoning for the pyramids, how they lived, and the impact they had on today’s world.
Maths: In Maths, we get to learn through using concrete resources such as base 10, cubes, 10s beads, and counters, as well as visual resources to enhance and cement our understanding. We will be working on place value, addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, fractions, shapes, and many other interesting concepts! In maths, we push for confidence in ourselves, and use our growth mind set as often as we can, by saying ‘I can’t do it YET’.
English: For English we use high quality texts. In this we learn how to use a variety of styles and writing for purposes, such as narratives, diary entries, recounts and many more. We use a ‘Talk for Write’ model of writing within our classroom to help us with our understanding and remembering of a text. In each piece of writing, we use different writing skills appropriate to our success criteria to enhance our writing and become the best writers we can be.
We love being fit and active. We take part in the daily mile and have two dedicated PE lessons every week. We have already learned skills in dodgeball, hockey, target ball, Kho Kho, relay racing, gymnastics, and swimming. This term we are learning more skills in gymnastics and beginning to explore outdoor and adventure games.
PE and Forest School: Please ensure Forest School kits, including a waterproof coat and wellington boots, are in school each week ready for your child to use. PE kits should be kept in school and returned home at the end of each half term.
READING: This year, we have opened the ‘Starbooks’ reading café, where the children will be able to choose from a variety of books to read. These will include both the chosen ‘Accelerated Reading’ books, or from our class collection.
The expectation is that children read at home daily and we encourage parents / carers to support their child by sharing stories with them as regularly as possible. Use their reading diary to record reads and share progress. We want to develop a ‘love for reading’ as well as developing reading fluency and comprehension.
Our teachers love books in Swifts, and we love to read too! We have a reading challenge to read as many books as we can for a prize, and we enjoy our reading lessons too. We are reading books during our ‘DEAR’ time, and our favourite one so far is Fantastic Mr Fox.
In reading we will learn how to retrieve information, infer a character’s thoughts, feelings and motives, find, understand and apply vocabulary in the books we read, and how to answer questions based on what we have read. Miss Taylor is introducing us to a wide variety of texts to broaden our reading.
GROWTH MINDSET
Growth mind set is important to us in Swifts and at our school. We believe that it is our attitudes and resilience that helps us to be great and that with hard work and determination we can achieve our goals. We have a short reflection at the end of every day to discuss what we have learnt, what we have enjoyed, and what are wanting to learn tomorrow!
REFLECTION
As a class, we take part in a five-minute reflection at the beginning and end of the day, where we use a special prayer to bring a positive start and end to our day at school. We use this time to reflect on our morning, day at school, what we have enjoyed or not enjoyed, and how we can make tomorrow even better. By taking this time to focus on our school value of the week, we are able to strengthen our Christian values, growth mindset, and our approach to the day.
REFERENCES FROM THE CHILDREN
We risked it all and asked Swifts to give us a reference, to tell you what we’re really like…
Here is what they said about us…
‘At Upper Arley, every day is interesting!’
‘We look after everyone no matter what!’
‘I love maths, art, Miss Taylor and forest school!’
‘My favourite thing about this class is the funny children!’
Want to see what we are learning this summer? Download the file below and have a read!