Year 5 News 7.05.21

What another wonderful week! Shorter than usual but we still achieved a huge amount – well done Year 5! Keep reading to take a look at what we have been up to.

In our English lessons this week, we have learnt the end of our model balanced argument and recapped the whole text using our story maps. By doing this, the children are able to recall the text well and use this in their own writing. We then moved on to plan our own 'innovation' text. We based these on the question, 'Should all citizens in Ancient Greece be allowed to vote?' We considered our points for and against this argument in preparation for writing our text. This week, we have also started to write our balanced argument as a class. We looked at the opening of each paragraph and continued by writing the rest. We have written the first three paragraphs of the text so far and we will finish these on Monday. In our handwriting sessions this week, we have been practising the formation of the words; programme, physical, queue, sacrifice and recommend.

In our book club lessons, we have been learning about the moon landings! The children have loved reading news articles about the first men on the moon. We been exploring key vocabulary within the text and how we can use skimming and scanning techniques to look for key vocabulary which will help us to find an answer. We have also been exploring the use of facts and opinions in a text. Again, we have looked at the vocabulary within a sentence which tells us whether the statement is a fact or opinion. The children have been working really hard building upon their comprehension skills.

In our Maths lessons this week, we have completed our second unit of fractions. We ended this unit by learning about problem solving using fractions. The children had to consider the key words within the question to work out what calculation we were being asked to use. We then moved on to our new unit of Fractions. In our first lesson, we introduced the new vocabulary and concepts that we would be learning about. We then explored how to multiply fractions. The children very quickly became experts at this and were able to work through both of these lessons efficiently. As Year 5 had such a good understanding of this concept, we have been able to introduced lots of reasoning problems as well as completing all of the work in our Power Maths books!

Our Geography focus was to learn more about the weather and climate in Greece and then record similar weather information for the UK. This was a great way to compare and talk about the reasons why our climate is different. We used our background knowledge to explain that Greece is in Southern Europe and closer to the equator. We also learnt that the weather does change across the country due to the landscape, particularly in the mountainous regions in the north of Greece. We used the iPads to research further and interpreted weather charts to make a summary statement.

Our HeartSmart lesson this week was called 'Time to Get Real.' We talked about how images we see on social media and in magazines are not always real. Images in the media (and online) do not always reflect reality. We acknowledged how Barbie and Ken look perfect and how the Lammily dolls have imperfections, look real and can boost self-esteem and body image. An informative discussion about how these dolls demonstrate what happens on social media and magazines was had. People can use filters to create photos of themselves that don't show how they really look. This led us to talk about how this can make us feel. We may compare ourselves to the 'perfect' photo when actually, we are our own 'perfect.' We are unique, proud of what we see, and are glad to be real – Fake is a Mistake!

In music, we sang our Ancient Greek song – Have You Heard The Story? We chose which lines from each verse to incorporate our glockenspiels to. We will look at that next week.

In our French lessons this week, the children recapped how to pronounce the days of the week. We shared a song to help us remember the days of the week and played some different games. The children were given days of the week cards in French and English to play snap with and we used these for a matching game. We then started to learn about the months of the year. We are now able to ask 'What month is it?' and answer with January, February, March, April and May in French. We will continue to learn these next week.

In Computing, we recapped the formulas that we had been introduced to last week. We chatted about why spreadsheets are useful and how we could use them in everyday life. We talked about their uses as planning tools, for budgeting, to record scores like football match information and much more. The children then logged back in to our class Google Drive and saved their own copy of the next document we would be working on. Our task for this week was to add formulas to a Hockey league table. We needed to add formulas involving more than one calculation e.g. a multiplication and addition sum. We also learnt about how to find match scores and differences in scores, using the formulas. Once we had done this, some children went on to explore how we could input this data into a spreadsheet. We will continue with this next lesson.

During our History lessons this week, we have started to learn about the Ancient Olympic Games. The children started our lesson by writing a list of as many Olympic events they could think of. We were amazing at this! We then went on to learn that the Olympics were first started by the Greeks in 776BC as a celebration for the God, Zeus. To learn more about the Olympics, the children were given Greek vases (linking nicely to our Art) to explore how the games were depicted through artwork. The children were able to match the Ancient events to the vases. At the end of the lesson, we played a game which involved the children striking poses to represent an Olympic event and the rest of the class guessing.

In our DT lesson this week, we looked at information cards for different people outlining the type of cushion they wanted and the purpose they wanted it for. The children were then asked to design a cushion suitable for the person's aesthetic and functional criteria. We then started to look at how we could design our own cushions and what we skills could use. We will continue with our design next week.
In Science, we have learnt more about our planets in the solar system. We reflected back on our learning from last lesson. We previously considered scientific questions and how we would answer them, discussed whether the Earth was flat, did a speed game of finding information about the planets and made a relative size model of the planets and the distance from the sun using fruit. In our lesson today, we built on our knowledge of the planets. The children were each given an information sheet about the planets and then took part in a 'speed meeting' in which they had 3 minutes to talk to another child in class about their planet and ask each other questions. Everyone loved this activity and it helped us to learn a lot about the planets. Once we had completed the 'speed meeting', we wrote down what we had learnt about each of the planets in our books.

During mindfulness this week, the children listened to a piece of music and drew how the music made them feel. I had then previously asked the children to think about a piece of music that they listen to to make them happy. We shared many of these today. It was amazing to see the different styles and genres of music that made us happy! We got up and had a sing and dance along and it put a lot of smiles on our faces!

For NSPCC number day, the children came dressed as numbers or their TT rockstars character. I loved seeing all of your costumes! In the morning, we were given time to play on TT rockstars and earn points in the competition. You all played really well and showed great perseverance when the app was struggling to cope with the amount of people playing! We then all played a mathionaire quiz which covered a range of mathematical skills. We worked with partners to answer our questions. We also played our favourite class game of fizz buzz!

I hope you all have a wonderful weekend and I look forward to seeing you all on Monday!