Year 5 News!

What a fantastic and busy second week back we have had! This week has been Science week!

In our English lessons this week, we have been continuing to learn more of our talk for writing model text. We can now recall the first four paragraphs! We have explored our text for key skills. A focus of ours in on the use of commas. This covers commas within speech, commas before FANBOYs, commas for fronted adverbials and commas for parenthesis. We made a toolkit of how commas could be used and found examples in the text. We then moved on to recap how commas should be used for speech in one lesson and how commas should be used for parenthesis in another. Focusing on speech, we also recalled part of our story using character puppets. The children improvised the conversation between our two main characters. We then wrote this in our books. We have then ended the week by starting to write a newspaper which recalls the key information of the story whilst focusing on the use of speech and parenthesis. We will finish this on Monday.

In our Maths lessons this week, we continued with our unit on Fractions. We have learnt about sequencing fractions and comparing and ordering fractions, over three lessons. We have been using number lines and have learnt how to convert fractions to the same denominator in order to be able to sequence them. We then moved on the learn about fractions as division. The children were given circles of card and ask to share their 'pizza' (circular card) into equal slices of a certain amount. During our Maths lessons this week, we have spent a lot of time referring to cake and pizzas! It has been great!

On Tuesday, we had a Science filled day. We started off with a very exciting balloon release. We watched as a giant balloon was lifted in to the air to take ariel images. We were told how balloons like this are sent off to the edge of space to take images and record information. In our afternoon, we were lucky enough to be part of some science experiments led by Mr Nottingham from High Impact. We started our afternoon by learning about the pressure inside a bell jar to create a vacuum. We were shown what happens when pressure is reduced and how a marshmallow reacted. We then saw what happened when the pressure was released back in to the jar. Mr Nottingham then explained that the marshmallow was like an astronaut and when astronauts went in to space, they needed an outfit to protect them. We talked about how the space suit protected them from the change in pressure. We then took part in three very exciting experiments on rotation.

We have continued to work on our Art work this week. After researching the Greek gods and goddesses last week, we were able to design our own art work. We chose one god or goddess that we were going to base our work around and began to draw. We thought about repetitive patterns and abstract shapes like Victoria Topping. We also considered how our colour scheme would represent our God. At the end of the week, the children created their backgrounds for their art work.

We also had our first History lesson this week. We started by writing down everything that we already know about the Greeks. We will then be able to go back to this at the end of the unit and reflect on what new things we have learnt. We then moved on to locate Greece on a world map whilst also identifying many other European countries. We watched a video which explained the expansion of the Greek empire and why these changes happened. We then looked at a map of Ancient Greece and how this was split in to independent city-states. Using the iPads, we researched interesting information about each of the city states. We shared what we had found at the end of our lesson.

In our PE lessons this week, we have had our Athletics lesson with Sportscape and our cricket lesson with Harry. The focus of our sportscape lesson this week was on our hurdles and javelin skills. In our cricket session, we learnt how to bowl the ball effectively. At the end, we used our skills in a match.

We managed to fit in time for our first French lesson since returning to school. Picking up from where we left off from lockdown, we recapped items of clothing, counting to 30 and then started to learn about days of the week. You always amaze me with how much you can remember! At the end of our lesson, I shared with you a 'days of the week' song that I had learnt in school!

In our HeartSmart lesson, we learnt about Nelson Mandela and how he became famous for his long fight against bad government and racial prejudice. After studying some of his quotes, we discussed what the quotes taught us about forgiveness and not 'rubbing it in.' Then, we moved on to discussing his life and how that teaches us about forgiveness. We reflected on our previous unit about letting love in and how this is so important when forgiving.

In music this week, we used sheet music when playing the glockenspiels. We played 2 pieces -Easy E and D-E-F-initely. We looked at notes and rests on the bar staff; how many counts they were worth as well as studying the musical scale. We began using 2 beaters too! Next, we played our next piece Mardi Gras Groovin'. We enjoyed swaying along to this piece! To finish our lesson, we listened to and copied back 3 notes at a time. This was quite tricky but we tried really hard!

Finally, we ended our week with an award ceremony in which everyone was presented with a headteacher's award for the amazing things that they did in home learning! Again, I am so proud of you all.

It has been another wonderful week in Year 5!
Miss Welch