In Hodgkin Class, we fully embrace the new Primary Strategy and through it we teach a wide, interesting, and challenging curriculum.  Our projects are influenced by the children's interests, and ensure full coverage of the National Curriculum objectives across the year. Our projects run for the entire term and involve exciting opportunities including trips, visitors, engineering days and 'Wow Days’. 

Our key question this term is ‘What did the Shang Dynasty do for us?’  Our superb starter will be an art themed day, we will be creating beautiful willow pattern watercolours and cherry blossom collages. We will explore different media to create different effects and textures. Our mix-it-up-middle will be a DT themed day, beginning with cooking some traditional Chinese dishes and then a banquet, followed by a pagoda building project in the afternoon. Finally, our enthralling ending will be a survival day based around the theme of “Kensuke’s Kingdom”, designing shelters and rafts with natural resources and creating maps with clues and co-ordinate problems.

Our class reading books will include the ‘Firework Maker’s Daughter’ by Phillip Pullman and ‘Kensuke’s Kingdom’ by Michael Morpurgo which we will also study in English. There will be lots of opportunities for cross-curricular writing, such as in our study of the Shang Dynasty and the separation of materials in science.

The learning environment will be themed on Japan and China, comprising of a cherry blossom reading corner, a bright blue ocean-based area and many flags and hanging lanterns.

In our art lessons we will be exploring colour and tones by mixing paints, before then exploring the art of Hokusai.  We will then recreate a piece of his art using our new colour mixing techniques by printing using poly blocks.

In computing we will be exploring the Scratch software to design different programmes and games, while also creating algorithms for our programmes.

Our science lessons will look at the properties of materials, how they are used based on their properties and suitability. We will also explore how materials change in formation and how some changes can be reversed but others cannot.

Our RE topics are Christianity and Hinduism, through these religions we will be exploring the Christian 10 commandments and how Christians show their belief in the modern day, and also looking at the importance of the river Ganges to Hindus, and comparing their festivals with those of other religions.

In history lessons we will be studying the Shang Dynasty in depth, learning who Fu Hao was, the greatest achievements of the Shang Dynasty, major cities from the Dynasty and comparing this all to other civilisations such as the Egyptians – which the children enjoyed learning about in Curie class.

Music lessons will be based around traditional Chinese and Japanese music, looking at the pentatonic scale (a very popular, well used scale in both traditional, and modern music.) We will also be describing how this music compares to various other genres of music.

In DT we will be cooking stir-fry dishes using skills such as boiling, steaming and chopping. We will also be evaluating current cooking utensils and creating our own based on our research.

Our geography lessons will focus on settlements, comparing similarities and differences between Chinese villages and the city of Beijing. We will also look at how trade links work by buying and selling products.