Our Class Text and Comprehension
In terms 5 and 6, our reading comprehension lessons will be based upon our class text, “Secrets of a Sun King,” by Emma Carroll. The book is about a girl from London who becomes an unlikely heroine in a quest to break an ancient curse that threatens her family. Her quest takes her to Egypt. She forms good friendships along the way and solves mysteries about her life and the life of the young pharaoh, Tutankhamun, who lived 3000 years ago.
To find out more about this text, view our Secrets of a Sun King Novel Knowledge Organiser.
For further information about the reading skills we will focus upon this term, please view “Shakespeare’s Sequential Reading Curriculum”
Independent Reading
In class, we will continue to use the Accelerated Reader program. For further information about this, please view a Parent’s Guide to Accelerated Reader. (https://help.renlearn.co.uk/AR/ARParentGuide) If you need your child’s AR password, please contact me (Mrs Bromfield).
Writing
Over the course of the term, we will be writing free verse poetry, instructional texts and stories from other cultures.
Firstly, we will be writing poems in free verse. This will allow the children to experiment with expanded noun phrases. Children can write a free verse poem inspired by one of the Sumerian Temple Hymns. They can choose one temple and its god or goddess as the subject of their poem.
We will also be writing instructions. Writing instructions encourages children to follow the conventions of a text type, including the order of the content, language, style choices and the layout. Children will write instructions about how to make an Egyptian mummy. They can use fronted adverbials and organisational devices, such as bullet points and numbers.
Furthermore, we will be writing a story from another culture. This will encourage the children to immerse themselves in a different way of life. Children will write in paragraphs as they describe settings, characters and plots. They can use noun phrases in their descriptions and inverted commas in direct speech.
For further information about the writing skills, we will focus upon this term, please view “Shakespeare’s Sequential Writing Curriculum”
Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling
Punctuation
In terms five and six we will learn how to demarcate sentences with increasing security, including apostrophe for omission and possession; write dictated sentences which require decisions about punctuation; and use a comma to separate main clause from subordinate clause.
Grammar
Our grammar lessons will focus on identifying word classes; making suitable choices of sentence type according to chosen genre; maintain consistency of tense in writing; understanding of the meaning of less familiar words, being more adventurous to use these in own writing; independently make suitable choices of sentence type according to chosen genre.; and increasingly control a variety of verb forms in spoken and written contexts.
Spellings
During our spelling lessons in Terms Five and Six, we will learn how to spell; words ending in –tion; the prefixes anti- and inter; the suffix -ation; endings spelt –tion, –sion, –ssion, –cian; adding suffixes beginning with vowel letters to words of more than one syllable; words with the /k/ sound spelt ch; words with the /s/ sound spelt sc; possessive apostrophe; and homophones and other words that are often confused
To view our weekly breakdown of our spellings, please view our Term 5 and Term 6 Homework Grid.
In addition to these weekly spelling rules, we will continue to learn and spell words from the Year 3 and 4 statutory spelling list. For an overview of these spellings, please view the Spelling word list for Year 3 and Year 4.