Welcome to Oak Class!

 Our topic during the Spring Term will be...

  'Raging Rivers and Monstrous Mountains!'

This term the children will be exploring rivers and mountains across the world. It is a very exciting topic that encourages the children to gain worldwide knowledge of the word's most fascinating rivers and mountains! The children will learn that mother nature is certainly a powerful and unstoppable force!

Our key text this term is 'October, October' by Katya Balen.

Eleven year old October – named for the month she was born in – lives in the forest with her dad. She refuses to see her mum who lives far away in London and, in October’s eyes, abandoned her and her dad. Yet October is happy with the way things are – she doesn’t go to school, preferring to live as wild as she can in the woods, learning about nature and doing things the old-fashioned way with Dad.

Yet, when her mum reappears on October’s twelfth birthday, Dad is horribly injured in an accident and October is forced to leave her wild home in the woods to stay in London with her mum. Everything in the city is wrong, from the cars and underground trains that make her sick to school, where the other kids tease her. Worst of all, October hates her mother and refuses all her efforts to build a relationship – all she wants is to go home with Dad.

Gradually, though, as Dad slowly recovers in hospital, October starts to adjust to her tamed city life, making friends with a boy in her class and discovering the semi-wildness that is mudlarking on the Thames. Slowly, October lets her mum in to her heart, and life starts to change for the better. Can October and Dad ever return to the wild? Or are there some things about the city that aren’t so bad after all?

Our topic during the Autumn term will be...

'Victorian Visionaries'

This term the children will be exploring the Victorian era and what life was like during this time period. We are especially looking forward to our trip to Perlethorpe where the children will experience what life was like for Victorian children. 

This topic promises to provoke many questions from the children as they develop a good understanding of what it would have been like to live in Victorian England.  

Our key class text for this half term will be:

'Gaslight' By Eloise Williams

It's 1899 in Cardiff and Nansi lives a life in the shadows. After her mother mysteriously went missing, Nan survives by thieving and taking part in fraudulent stage shows under orders from Pernicious Sid, the Empire Theatre's ruthless owner.

But with a love of books and her best friend Bee keeping her strong, Nansi is determined to find out the truth about what happened to her mum - even if it leads her into real danger.

Gaslight is a fabulous ride, full of heartstopping moments as Nansi's fearlessness gets tested to the limit.

With Dickensian characters and a brilliantly realised atmosphere, young readers will be transported into another world - there's nothing sanitised about Eloise Williams' take on Victorian Cardiff. Children and adults alike will be unable to stop tearing through the pages, just as desperate as Nansi to find out what's really been going on in those gaslit streets…

In Year 6, we will be basing most of our writing on this excellent Victorian time period story.