This term, Meadow Class’s topic is “A Pirate’s Life for Me” where the class will be exploring a variety of pirate characters as well as different aspects of a pirate’s life. The children in Meadow Class really love having a topic book read to them, so in the first week, we will be focusing on the first of our topic books in this area; “10 Little Pirates” by Mike Brownlow. The class will learn about the different scenes from the book in their other lessons such as making and English too. In the second week, we will be thinking about the different types of pirates we may have met or seen in books and TV such as Captain Hook, Jack Sparrow and Captain Underpants. We will be using “10 Little Pirates” to refer to in topic sessions. The class will also use real world toys and sensory materials to reenact different parts of the story as well as beach and general pirate scenes such as digging for treasure.

In the third week, Meadow Class will move onto our next story, “Pirates Love Underpants” by Claire Freedman, learning about the themes and locations of the story. We will be copying different pages from this book to support the pupil’s understanding of characterisation as well as letter formation, writing for purpose and word/sentence building.

Then, as we move into the fourth week the class will be looking at the last story for the topic which is “The Pirates are Coming!” by John Condon. As we move into the last few weeks of the half term, Meadow Class will be doing some writing, role play and drawing about different stories and tales from pirate life such as Treasure Island and Moby Dick. The last few lessons will be based on what we have learnt about in this topic and will ultimately conclude “A pirate’s life for me”. The class will also be  carrying out some exciting pirate-themed lessons throughout the term which I’m sure they will enjoy.

This half term, we will be aiming to visit LIDL supermarket, Banstead Library (to visit the amazing  Magic Table) as well as Priory Park (with the pirate ship in the playground) on our community visits. This half term, Meadow Class will also have the exciting opportunity to continue visiting Epsom RDA this term for horse riding on Thursday mornings, and the children will also be going on a whole day class trip later in the half term based on our topic of “A pirate’s life for me”. After the half term break, Meadow Class will be taking part in swimming sessions at Dorking Leisure centre on Tuesday mornings, which I know the class are very excited about so please send in swimming kits on Tuesdays after the half term.

In our maths lessons, Meadow Class will continue to explore 3-D shapes, building numbers beyond 10 and taking away. In the English sessions, some children are continuing to trace words, write independently using a pencil grip, match words to each other as well as use the pirate-themed topic books as stimulus for role play experiences. Additionally, other children will be focusing on communicating with peers (familiar and unfamiliar), choosing from two/three options and using their own words to name unknown objects. We will also continue to carry out our exciting phonics sessions each week using the Twinkl scheme of work which I know the class will enjoy. We will continue to send new books home every Friday with each child’s reading records as these have been very  successful this year so far.

The class will continue to carry out the Jigsaw PSHE sessions in class and our topic for PSHE this half term is ‘Relationships’, where the children will be looking at making new friends and falling out with friends. For science sessions, Meadow Class will be starting some animal and physics-based sessions and our topics for these sessions this half term will be ‘Animal detectives’ and ‘Pushes and pulls’.

Additionally, the class will be cooking different foods in cooking sessions on a Wednesday based on our “A pirate’s life for me” topic with Teresa, which will include pirate ship hot dogs, jelly seas and pirate cookies.

Alex and the Meadow Class Team