Year 5 News!

In our lessons this week, we planned and wrote our own imagination stories based on a time-slip. The children were given the opportunity this week to choose their own characters, past tense setting and relic to be discovered. The children chose to slip back in time to places like London during the Queen's coronation, the deck of the Titanic, the Jurassic period and so much more! I have loved your creative writing this week and you showed how you included all of the skills we had learnt. You should how you could use rhetorical questions, short snappy sentences, repetition and onomatopoeia to build suspense. As well as using fronted adverbials and subject specific vocabulary.

This week, we have started our addition and subtraction unit of work. You have wowed me with your skills this week. We started by recapping how to use column addition to add two 4-digit numbers together. We then moved on to explore column addition with 5-digit or more and used carrying to represent numbers which went over the value of the column which they were sat in. We have then moved on to use column subtracting to subtract 4-digit, 5-digit and 6-digit numbers. The children used exchanges when the number they were subtracting was larger than the number that they started with. We also explored how we exchanged multiple times if the column that we needed to exchange from had a 0 in it.

In our History lessons this week, we began by exploring the phrase 'Prisons of the Poor'. Using what we learnt about workhouses, the children explored why they thought workhouses were given the name 'prisons of the poor'. We then moved on to learn about the life of rich and poor children in Victorian times. We explored the type of lives poor children had and the roles that they did in these times. We also used all of our knowledge that we had learnt when learning about schools and workhouses too.

In Science we worked on an investigation titled 'In a Spin'. We created our own paper helicopters and learnt how important it is to take repeat readings to help improve the accuracy of our results. We discussed how to keep the factors the same and the one factor that would differ was the weight of the helicopter. We added paperclips to record how long it took for the helicopter to land on the floor. We also explored how to use the Newton meter to measure forces and we announced the winners of our Gravity poster competition. Five lucky winners went home with a gravity related prize!
 
Our Computing work was based on our Studio Code coding skills. We extended our understanding of loops from previous lessons and practised our debugging skills to solve a variety of problems.

This week, we started our Geography unit of work. Over the term, we are going to be learning about Trade and Economics. In our first lesson, we started by writing what we knew about the question 'what is trade?' Once we have completed our unit, we will then come back to answer this question again. To start our learning about trade, the children were given a set of Country Top Trumps. They explored how to use these to play a game and what the game would tell us about these countries. We explored key vocabulary such as population, arable land, capital population and literacy rate. Finally, we went on to explore what the words import and export meant. The children were then given a list of items and asked to consider whether these were imported to the UK or exported from the UK or even both. It was really interesting to explore what the children thought the UK produced and what they had to import from other countries.

In our RE lesson this week, the children continued to explore how Nehemiah felt during the story of his life in the bible. Using our poem, we noted down how he would have felt throughout his life. Then, children used everything they had learnt about Nehemiah and Daniel to answer our big question: How do Christians believe that God talks to people through the bible?

During our music lesson this week, we learnt about the artist Hans Zimmer and listened to some of the different songs he has created. We explored what we liked about the songs and how these made us feel. We were then given our first opportunity to have a play our ukuleles. We learnt how to how the ukuleles correctly and play the first couple of notes.

For Mindful Monday this week, we have continued to explore the theme of self-esteem. The children were required to complete an 'all about me' activity which explored their personal feelings. The children had to think about 3 words to describe themselves, what they liked to do and what they would like to be when they are older. It was nice seeing the children take the time to think and explore these interesting questions.

In PE this week, we have continued to develop our Hockey skills. We focused on improving our loose, straight and Indian dribble, our push pass and our jab tackle. The children used all of these skills within small games involving attackers and defenders. We also traded our tennis balls for hockey balls during this lesson so it took us some time to adjust to the new equipment and develop an understanding of how these balls reacted differently to a tennis ball.

We have filled our week with a lot of exciting learning and we cannot wait to see what next week holds.

Have a lovely weekend!
Miss Welch