In Swallowtail, our topic for this half term will be ‘Celebrations’.

In English, we will be exploring five different festivals/celebrations over the course of the half term, looking at a different celebration each week. Our first celebration will be Carnival, looking specifically at the celebrations that take place in Brazil. After that, it’ll be May Day, Midsummer, Mehndi (Henna) and Eid. We will look at the different cultures and traditions surrounding each celebration, and the reasons for it. We will be making use of three books to help us with our learning. These are the Big Book of Festivals, Celebrations Around the World and The Great Henna Party.

The Big Book of Festivals and Celebration Around the World contains lots of lovely information regarding the celebration we have chosen to look at, as well as many more. The Great Henna Party is a lovely story about a young girl called Noor who is experiencing a Mehndi party of the eve of her cousin’s wedding. We will look at each book where appropriate, depending on which celebration we will be focusing on each week. We, as a class, will be creating a display board that will contain work, information and art about each celebration within our classroom.

In Maths, we will continue with our streamed White Rose curriculum, which for this half term will be looking at fractions and geometry.

For Science, we will be looking at rocks and doing a variety of information-gathering tasks and surveys around the school grounds, as well as utilising White Rose resources to assist in our learning.

Our PSHE topic, making use of Jigsaw and its resources, will be around the topic of ‘Healthy Me’. Through this, we will be learning about and expanding upon, how we can be healthy in a variety of different ways.

Our Cooking and Art sessions will reflect our topic of Celebrations, and each week we will be cooking a particular food, and making art inspired by the celebration we are focusing on that week. For example, the week we will be thinking about May Day, we will making strawberries (and other fruits) and cream, and making May Day Maypole art, all of which we will display on our celebrations board in our classroom.

We are all looking forward to a fun and eventful half term in the lead up to Easter.

 Tom and the Swallowtail Class Team.