Beech Grove Primary School
Autumn Term 2026
Head Teacher Message
Welcome back to our new Autumn term. On behalf of the staff, we would like to welcome you to a new school year and hope that 2026/2027 is just as brilliant as last year. It was wonderful to see our whole school community trying their very best for our children to try and reach their maximum potential. I am positive this year will be exactly the same.
Once again, I cannot thankyou enough for the tremendous efforts you went to during last year to support your children and the school. We should, as a school community be really proud of the way we continue to stick together and support one another.
I hope that you have all had the chance to relax and recharge your batteries during the summer holidays (wasn’t the weather just fabulous!) and are ready once more to attack the new school year with vigour and enthusiasm.
It is so important that our children attend regularly in order to continue to make the brilliant progress that they made last academic year. Our school attendance needs to be better! It is not acceptable to keep your child off for anything other than genuine illness and bereavement. Our school attendance will only get better with YOUR fantastic support.
I’m positive with your continued efforts, our excellent teaching and well-planned curriculum and interventions, our children will continue to achieve well and try their very best in all lessons.
After all my years at Beech Grove. I continue to be amazed by our children. I am so proud of them all and the way they have started back this Autumn term. The children’s continued resilience and adaptability is outstanding.
Our Next-Door Neighbour Qualities of Respect, Tolerance and Kindness shine through in their everyday school life. It is wonderful to see.
As always, 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, and will support them with their homework and reading outside of school. READING is the key to EVERYTHING and unlocking the children’s true potential! Please, please, please x10000000 encourage them as much as you can with their reading at home. It really is greatly appreciated by all staff.
John Dixon
Our work for this term
English
In English this term, the children will be following the Grammarsaurus scheme to become masters at sentences structures before applying this to their written work. We will also be writing a discursive text about whether Howard Carter, who discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb, was a hero or a villain.
After half term, our English work will be largely based around space exploration. First, we will be writing a non-chronological report based on the planets in our solar system. After this, we will be writing a diary entry from the perspective of an astronaut who is visiting an unknown planet for the first time. Finally, in the lead up to Christmas we will be writing out own poems and reimagining ‘King of Seasons’.
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. This will culminate in our “mummified tomato” experiment, which is a particular highlight of this term. Our focus in art is sculpture and we will be creating our own Egyptian cartouches. In Music, we will be learning about different genres and perform our own 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: Tuesday 1st September 2026 – Friday 18th December 2026
Half Term: Monday 26th October 2026 – Friday 30th October 2026
Swimming: Monday 21st September 2026 – Friday October 2nd 2026
Christingle Assembly: December Wednesday 16th December at St Chad’s Church