Beech Grove Primary School
Autumn Term 2025
Head Teacher Message
Happy New Year everyone and welcome to spring term 2025. The time has flown since children started their new classes in September! This Spring term will fly even faster no doubt as the evenings become lighter and the daffodils start to poke through putting a smile on everyone’s face.
As Head teacher of your school, I continue to be so proud of all of the children and the way they have started back since returning from the Christmas break. Their resilience and adaptability remain outstanding.
This was picked up on and noticed in abundance during the schools Ofsted Inspection on the 22nd and 23rd of October. The HMI Ofsted Inspector was blown away of what he described to us as ‘school is an oasis of calm’ for all children at Beech Grove.
“Pupils at Beech Grove are proud of their school, welcoming visitors with exemplary manners and conduct. They understand the school’s ‘next-door neighbour’ principles and the school’s five golden rules well. Pupils consistently show high levels of respect to adults and to one another. They are happy and safe. Highly trained staff put pupils’ needs first in all they do. Pupils thrive in the warm and nurturing environment that the school fosters.” Ofsted 2024/25. What a fantastic first paragraph of the Ofsted Report to read. I’m sure you’ll all agree.
This term we hope to pick up where we left off before Christmas with our children achieving good progress within their core subject areas, due to the tremendous hard-working attitude of themselves and the dedicated staff team here at school.
“Leaders have created a culture of high expectations for pupils’ achievement. Pupils meet these expectations… Behaviour across school is of a high standard. Well-trained staff create a purposeful learning atmosphere. Pupils’ learning is not disrupted by others. ”Ofsted 2024/25.
Children’s classroom and corridor manners remain amazing which continues to maintain a lovely, positive and caring atmosphere around school. The schools “Next Door Neighbour Qualities” of Respect, Tolerance and Kindness are certainly being upheld. The children take great pride in this in and around school and it is wonderful to see. Please keep having a bit of fun at home and test the children regularly on what it takes in school (and the community) to be a good “Next Door Neighbour”!
This term we will also be hoping for some lovely spring sunshine so that children can make full use of our Secret Garden in lesson time and maybe plant some wonderful spring flowers for us all to enjoy (even the ducks!!!). I always think that spring flowers with their vibrant colours and freshness cheer everyone up from the gloom of the long, dark and wet winter months. They are a sign that lighter nights and warmer weather is on its way! (fingers crossed)
Our teachers have lots of interesting activities planned for this term and hope that you will enjoy hearing what children have been working on at consultation meetings/phone conversations, and will support them with their homework and reading outside of school.
Please, please, please x10000 keep encouraging your child to read at home. Reading is the key to everything! The children are showing such a passion and love of reading in school, we hope you will continue this with them at home.
We also hope that every effort is made by you for every child to attend school regularly. It is so important for your child’s development. We can’t continue to stress this enough. (95% and above is GOOD attendance). As a school we need to bet better on the first and last day of terms. Far too many children have these particular days off.
In addition to this being ON TIME every day for school is absolutely vital so that your child does not miss any of their learning. It can be really upsetting and frustrating for children if they come into a lesson that is part way through and they’ve missed vital teacher input and modelling. It can cause them great distress and being left with a feeling of not understanding what is expected of them.
Its really pleasing to see that our ‘lates’ are reducing and that you are all working really hard to support school on this issue. Well done everyone. Keep up the great efforts. Let’s have all the children in on time every day!
Here’s to a really positive Spring term!
John Dixon
Our work for this term
English
In English this term, Year 5 will be writing an informal letter based on our class story ‘Secrets of a Sun King’. The letter will be from the main character Lil to her grandad who are both interested in our topic for Autumn 1 – Pharaohs. Following this we will write a suspense story. The story will be based on Lil visiting Egypt where she has to return a mysterious jar. Then we will move onto writing a biography about Howard Carter – the archaeologist who discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb, before moving onto some suspense fiction writing based on entering an Ancient Egyptian tomb. We will be focussing largely on using conjunctions correctly in our writing, description and using lots of different sentence types.
After half term, our English work will be largely based around space exploration. First, we will be writing a diary entry from the perspective of an astronaut who is visiting an unknown planet for the first time. After this, Year 5 will become reporters for two weeks and publish and newspaper report all about the astronaut’s visit to the newly discovered planet. Finally, in the lead up to Christmas we will be writing out own poems and reimagining ‘King of Seasons’. We will continue our focus of using different sentence types including dialogue.
Maths
In the first half term, we will begin with the importance of place value. Children will be taught how to identify the value of each digit in six-figure numbers and to be able to round to the nearest 10 and beyond up to 100,000. We will then move into number: where we will teach children to be confident in adding and subtracting numbers as well as multiplying and dividing. Lastly, we will be having a large focus on times tables and making sure our children are fluent up to their 12x tables.
After half term, we will move onto multiplication and division where children will be learning all about multiples, factors, prime numbers and square and cube numbers. We will also be learning key strategies to use when multiplying and dividing by 10,100 and 1000. Finally, children will begin exploring fractions where children will learn how to add and subtract, proper, improper and mixed number fractions.
Science/Topic
During the first half term our topic is ‘Pharaohs’. We will be learning about Ancient Egyptian life and what it was like to live under a pharaoh. We will focus on the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb by archaeologist Howard Carter and also learn about other famous Egyptian pharaohs as well as some of the Gods and Goddesses. In science, we will be learning all about the properties of materials and how they change through experimenting. Our focus in art is sculpture and we will be creating our own Egyptian cartouches. In Music, we will be learning about rock music and we will perform a Bon Jovi song! We will also be learning about systems in our computing lessons.
Our topic for the second half term is Stargazers. We will discover the wonders of space and look at some of the famous people through history such as Galileo and Isaac Newton. Y5 will investigate the eight planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune and take a look at the Moon, a celestial body that orbits Earth. Y5 will open their minds and discuss the questions are we alone? And are there other life forms out there? We will learn about the ‘Space Race’ and how Katherine Johnson helped America during this race.
Keeping Safe and Healthy (This section will tell you what we are teaching children about lifestyle choices)
This term we will look at how to face new challenges positively and how to set personal goals. We will discuss how we can empathise with people in this country whose lives are different to our own and understand our rights and responsibilities as a citizen and as a member of our school. In Autumn 2, we will be celebrating our differences and discussing how to keep safe online.
Dates for your Diary
Autumn Term: Monday 1st September 2025 – Friday 19th December 2025
Half Term: Monday 27th October 2025 – Friday 31st October 2025