Year 5 News 28.04.23

It has been great to develop our understanding of decimals in our Maths lessons this week. We used our place value knowledge and our knowledge of fractions, which helped us to understand what thousandths are. We were surprised to see a thousandths grid and we took the time to look at the value of one thousandth compared to one tenth and one hundredth.

Our English time has been split between our spelling focus of words that end with ant and ance, learning about possessive apostrophes and learning more of our model text. We explored the themes within each paragraph of our One Wish text alongside the emotions of the main character.

We have worked on our comprehension skills in Reading this week. We read a range of different texts including a dictionary, a factual report about Japan and a narrative piece.

In RE, we moved onto our new unit of work. In this unit, we will continue learning about the Islamic faith. In our first lesson, we learnt about the meaning of the words Allah, Islam and Muslim. We learnt that Muslims believe in the importance of obeying Allah.  We used this knowledge to begin creating our information booklets. 

In MyHappyMinds, we learnt how our emotions can impact how well we engage in something. We began thinking about which hormones will be released depending on how they are feeling. We remembered that when we are happy, dopamine is released. We remembered that we engage much better when this hormone is active.  As the lesson went on, we learnt about Big Dream Goals are and why they are important; we learnt about the power of setting goals and why it is so good for your brain. Finally, we each set our own Big Dream Goal.

In Geography, we began our new unit to learn about the Amazon. We explored our prior knowledge to know that it describes a river and a rainforest. We then used atlases to see that it also describes the Amazon river basin and the Amazon region. We used Digimaps software to identify the Amazon river and traced the path of the river from the source to the mouth. We were then able to identify nine countries and locate each country on a blank map of South America.

We enjoyed completing an unplugged computing activity this week. Our lesson introduced us to the idea of conditionals related to playing a game using playing cards. We selected cards at random and awarded points depending on the conditionals. We thought about if, else if and else conditionals.

In Art, our focus has been to complete more of our big art based on the rainforest. We enjoyed colour mixing to create different shades of green. We also enjoyed taking part in a teamwork activity to build the tallest free standing structure. Taking part in a group, enabled us to work on our teamwork skills. We also had the added challenge to not say certain nouns, and this saw our teamwork skills step up to the next level!

Our PSHE lesson reminded us how important it is to think of others alongside ourselves as referred to in the Bible as Love your neighbour as yourself. Mark 12:31. Our new unit is called Too much Selfie isn't healthy and our discussion centred around how we can show love to others. We then moved on to think about loneliness and how people may feel lonely in busy environments. This helped us to delve deeper and find out what it really means to be lonely. We also thought about people who may seek friendship online and what we can do to remain safe online. We then had the opportunity to become poets and we were blown away by your poetry based on loneliness Year 5, well done!

Hope you're all having a lovely weekend, and see you on Tuesday.