Year 5 News 05/11/22

Welcome back everybody. I hope you all had a lovely half term.

We jumped straight back into learning on Monday and started the week off with a new Maths topic. This week we have started our Addition and Subtraction unit. As part of our lessons, we have been recapping the rules we need to follow when doing column addition and subtraction. During our lessons, we also looked at more complicated exchanges and even did some challenges too. You were all great at this and proved you had a very good understanding of the column method. Well done, team!

In English, we also started a new unit. Our new Talk4Writing unit is focusing on Persuasive writing. We began the week by sharing what we already know. We did this by writing a persuasive piece. The aim of the piece was to persuade me whether white chocolate or milk chocolate was the best. Of course we had to try some to know for sure. It was wonderful to read your pieces and see all of the skills you remembered from last year. You all gave such good arguments that I still can't decide. We then moved onto learning our new model text. Our model text this time is all about the wonderful 'Rocket' (one of the first trains which was invented during the Victorian era). In the text, we are trying to persuade people to buy a ticket and take a ride on the rocket. The text also uses relative clauses. As a result, we spent the latter half of the week learning about relative pronouns and learning how to write relative clauses.

Our afternoon sessions have been filled with History, Science, Geography, Computing and P.E.

In history this week we have been learning about the daily lives of poor children. We used primary and secondary sources to investigate what it would have been like to have lived in a workhouse. Based on what we read, we decided that life would not have been very pleasant. We then went onto look at what children would have done to help their families stay out of the workhouse. Did you know that children during the Victorian era had to go to work? We learnt about the different jobs that children would have done and then decided as a class which was the worst job. Being a chimney sweep was the one that we decided was the worst.

Our Science time this week was dedicated to preparing our boats for our ongoing investigation. We began by recapping on the criteria we needed to stick to in order to keep it a fair test. This reminded us on how to use the size and quantity of materials carefully. We copied our designs and by the end of the session we had all completed three boats using foil and masking tape.

In computing, we learnt about a new concept. We began learning about conditional statements. Conditional statements are the way computers can make decisions. Conditional statements always have an if part, which tells the avatar what to do when the condition is true. To help us understand conditionals, we planned our own game using playing cards. We then applied this by completing our next Code Studio lesson.

In Geography this week, we learnt about the British Empire and we investigated how many continents the British Empire had colonies in. We realised that by the end of the Victorian Era, Britain had colonies in 6 of the 7 continents. We discussed whether we felt the British Empire was right to colonise other places. It sparked an interesting debate as you were able to think of pros and cons.

In P.E, you had your first cricket session. You practiced your throwing and catching skills and then moved onto play forever cricket!

I hope you all have a lovely weekend,

Miss P