Happy Easter year 5!

Wow what a busy but fantastic final week we have had before our Easter holidays. I am so proud of the commitment, determination and knowledge you each show every day.

In our English lessons this week, we have finished planning our innovation write. This is where you adapt our model text to suit your own story. We then wrote these very carefully. I modelled each paragraph of my own story on the board and we discussed the skills that I used at each step. We were focusing on our use of commas. We were using commas in many ways for lists, speech, fronted adverbials, parenthesis and before a co-ordinating conjunction. We also included many elements of suspense and the use of capitalisation to suit our style of writing. Finally, at the end of the week, we planned and wrote our own warning stories. The children were allowed to make many more choices about their stories and be as creative as they wanted. It was fantastic to see the ideas that you came up with.

In our Maths lessons this week, we have been continuing with our second fractions unit. We have been learning about adding and subtraction fractions again this week. We have been finding common denominators by changing our fractions in to equivalent fractions in order to find fractions with the same denominator. We have again been using the idea of pizza and cake to imagine the size of fractions and work out how many we have once we have either added or subtracted. This week we took on some problem-solving challenges which involved two and three step problems.

In our RE lessons this week, we explored what happens in a mosque from the perspective of a boy who worships there. We explored how the experience of worshipping in a mosque represents a community. We looked at 9 statements and were asked to order them by importance. For this task, we realised all the statements were equally important and supported the idea of the mosque as a community. We ended our lesson by considering how Allah is known as one unique God and how this again links to Allah representing a community.
In Science we explored reversible and irreversible changes with a range of everyday examples. We learnt that irreversible changes create new substances, and they do so when they are heated, burnt or mixed together. We found out about how rust is formed. To replicate this process, we completed an apple investigation in groups. We placed apples in different liquids and predicted which liquid would prevent the apple from going brown.
Music
We completed our Victoria Topping inspired art work this week from the book 'Mythologica'. The children have chosen a god/goddess, considered images to describe their choice of god/goddess and created their 'pop art' style art work. These have then been proudly displayed in our classroom. They look amazing and it is amazing to see how the children have individually expressed their ideas through their work!

During this week, we have completed our DT unit from the Autumn Term. In the Autumn term, we explored how to used cams and mechanisms to create a moving toy. The children had previously designed and built their structure for their toy. This week, we added our cams and followers to allow our toys to move. They children were able to explore how their toy moved and how they could reinforce the movement.

Following this, we have spent some time presenting some of our learning from last term. We have started our DT pages for our studywork books. We have shown the process of planning, designing and making our automata toys.

I hope that you are all enjoying your well-deserved Easter holiday and continue to enjoy the time you have left!

Miss Welch