Happy Half Term Y5 22/10/21

Happy Half Term Year 5! I can't believe we have come to the end of our first half term together. You have worked so hard and learnt so many new things. I am very proud of you all.

During our English lessons this week, we have been authors! How exciting! At the start of the week, we finished our shared write, edited it and then planned our hot write. Finally, by the end of the week, it was time to put all our new learning together to write our hot write. For the hot write, you chose your own settings, characters and warnings. Reading them has been real treat because each story is so exciting! Good work team.

In Maths, we started and finished a new unit all about statistics. During the unit, we have learnt how to read and interpret information in tables, two-way tables and line graphs. We have even been drawing line graphs too.

During the afternoons, we began our week with history. We weaved our Victorian unit with Black History Month and learnt about a famous Victorian called Mary Seacole. We learnt that she overcame many obstacles in order to follow her calling to build the 'British Hotel' which was a hospital and place of rest-bite for wounded soldiers during the Crimean war. The obstacles she faced were due to the prejudices people held about her race and gender. For example, on her journey to Britain she was refused passage on a ship because she was black. To understand why white people treated her differently because of the colour of her skin, we also learnt about the slave trade. We learnt that even though the slave trade was abolished in Britain during the Victorian era, Victorian daily life was still linked to those who were enslaved in America. By the end of the lesson, the whole class agreed that Mary Seacole is a wonderful example of determination and resilience.

On Tuesday, we came to the end of our unit R.E unit on 'Good News'. Using everything we have learnt, we created a mind map to answer the question 'How do Christians believe Jesus speaks good news to them through the life of Jesus?' We called upon our knowledge of the parables and the lessons within in them to help us answer the question. We then used these ideas to write an explanation. The second part of our Tuesday afternoon was filled with Art. In Art this week, we have been working towards our final piece. We used our symmetrical designs from last lesson to create our foam print block. The last stage is to start printing. How exciting! We will be doing this after half term.

On Wednesday, it was time for Music and P.E again. Your last music lesson of this half-term was a busy one! We listened to a gospel song titled 'Joyful, Joyful.' We thought the 'sticking together' message came through strongly in the lyrics. The rap verse was a welcomed surprise too! This added an extra layer to the song. The outcome of our 'favourite song' vote saw Ghost Parade crowned our favourite of this unit of music. Reasons for this being our favourite are: the song flows better; the music is more intense; the song keeps its tempo and the 'hook' has stayed in my mind! We then used notes C, D and E to compose a short piece of music. We did this in partners, or individually. Using our onscreen resource, we inputted our notes, listened to it being played back to us, then performed it to the class. Well done Year 5!

In our Computing lessons, we finished adding our information about Queen Victoria to our GoogleSlides. To do this, we recapped our knowledge of formatting text and adding photos to make sure they were looking great. Now the information is all in, we are ready to start adding hyperlinks between slides. The second part of our computing afternoon focused on coding where our focus was nested loops again.

On Friday, we completed some of the different projects we had started, had our last P.E session of the half term with Hayley and we were also visited by PC Nick. He came to speak to us about the dos and don'ts of Halloween and Bonfire night. You listened well and answered his questions sensibly. You all proved you knew how to stay safe and how to be respectful of others. Well done Year 5!

I hope you all have a wonderful half term,

Miss P