Happy Half Term Year 5 24.10.25

In English, we began the week by reviewing our plans to make sure our Mission Logs were filled with our best writer’s knowledge and skills. We have then constructed a 5-paragraph Mission Log which focuses on the use of fronted adverbials, technical and formal language, relative clauses and verb prefixes along with so much more! I am really proud of the work you have created.

Our mental calculation skills have really progressed this week. It was lovely to see how quickly we could spot patterns to speed up our calculations. Once we did this, we were able to identify which place value column changes. We have then moved on to add and subtract using our knowledge of partitioning. We learnt how we can keep our first number the same and partition to second number to be able to efficiently add or subtract those values mentally. We have really enjoyed building our confidence up over the course of the week.

This week, our reading focus was on developing confidence and fluency through individual reading.

Our spelling focus has been on the suffix -able.

As geographers, we explored cities across the U.K. and learned about ethical trade organisations. Using iPads, we completed a research task on the Soil Association, Cruelty Free International, Fair Wear, and the Rainforest Alliance. We then investigated the cost of a banana and how that cost is shared across the supply chain. This led to a thoughtful discussion about Fairtrade and why it’s important to ensure a fair share of the sale price. We looked at how much a banana worker might earn and considered what a fair wage could be – our justifications were fantastic!

In our RE lesson this week, we have learnt more about the holy scripture of Jewish faith – The Torah. We started by thinking about the statement, ' studying the Torah is considered by many Jews to be the greatest spiritual activity' and what we think this means. We then looked at some quotes from Hebrew scripture and found similarities between these messages and those of the Bible. We then went on to learn more about Islamic faith. We learnt about Muslim scripture and again found some similarities between the different faiths. We learnt that people of Muslim faith focus on memorising and learning their scripture and had a go at doing this to be able to reflect on whether this was an easy task. At the end of our lesson, we looked at quotes for the Qur'an and recorded the new information we had learnt about Islamic faith and Allah.

In Music this week, you showed enthusiasm and determination to produce a performance consisting of singing, following your composition and playing your glockenspiels was evident. In your music books, your comments were based around an increase in confidence, loving playing as a class, and how you have learnt to play more notes on your glockenspiels. You should be extremely proud of yourselves!

We enjoyed reflecting during our Wellbeing time this week.

We have enjoyed learning about Katherine Johnson in our Black History lessons. The children were really interested in her contributions to NASA as it was a great link to our Writing topics from this half term. We learnt lots of fantastic facts and recorded these on our own spacecrafts to add to a new display.

We enjoyed our final forest school this week. We started by recalling all of our learning from this half term. We have been amazed by the amount of learning which has taken place. We have learnt to build many different shelters, build fires and linked lots of learning to our Science topic. We ended our sessions with opportunity to build our own shelter and enjoy time to role play living in them alongside building our fires.

In our PE lesson this week, we enjoyed a celebration game session.

We have been artists this week. We have made our zines for our visual poetry books. We have also used colour mixing to add backgrounds and are ready to add our prints and other mixed medium and finish them off when we return to school.

Have a wonderful half term. See you soon!
Mrs Morris and Mrs Pointon