Year 5 Weekly News 10.09.21

Our first full week is done – wow – it's gone by so quickly as we have been so busy! The days have rushed by and we have achieved so much.

In maths, at the beginning of the week, we recapped our Year 4 knowledge of place value to 10,000. This was useful because we needed this to help us with our next maths task of the week . . . rounding. This was a tricky concept but with perseverance we recapped and mastered the skills of rounding to the nearest 10, 100 and 1000. In our starter questions, we have also been brushing off our arithmetic skills and have grown in confidence across the week too. Good work team!

In English, we started our first Talk4Writing unit of the year. Our first unit is all about journalistic writing. We began learning the text, and this unit's text is a twist a classic story that we think you will have heard of – Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Our text is a newspaper report documenting how Christopher Bear was awarded the Forestwich medal for bravery after he saved his family from a vicious vandal and a thief. Throughout the week, we investigated vocabulary and learnt that the choice of words you pick can sway the reader. This is called bias. We also investigated the structure and layout too to create a journalistic writing toolkit. Finally, in our spelling lessons we have started learning about silent letters. Our focus at the moment is the silent 'b'.

Big Art has been the main focus of our afternoons this week. We have been using the colour mixing skills from last week to paint our own piece of a portrait of Queen Victoria. Take a look at the photos to see the wonderful job we have done. Don't they all look amazing!

On Tuesday, we also did R.E. Our unit for this half term is Good News. We talked about what Good News is and then explored the themes of good news in 'The Parable of the Paralysed Man' by talking about how each character receives good news and we then recreated the story through role play

On Wednesday, you had your first Music and P.E session. This week in Music, we looked at our new unit called 'How Does Music Bring Us Together?' To begin with, we found the pulse to the background track as well as listening to rhythms and copying them back by clapping. We listened to a song called Ghost Parade and identified the hook as being 'Here comes the ghost parade.' Next, we began to look at the verses and choruses by studying the lyrics and considering whether the song is telling a story or not. We also learnt 2 more notes and rests – quaver, quaver rest, semi quaver and semi quaver rests. To find out all about what you did in PE, check out Mrs Jenkin's PE post.

On Thursday, it was our computing afternoon. To start the afternoon off we went on a fact finding mission. We used the iPads and our knowledge of research techniques to find out as much as we could about Queen Victoria. We found some seriously interesting facts. Did you know she was only 1.52m tall (which is about the same size as our James and our Jacob is taller than her already)? And, did you know that after her husband Albert died, she would only wear black which meant she wore black for 40 years! We moved onto coding in the second part of the afternoon. Our focus for our coding session was nested loops. This is where you create a pattern and then repeat it. To complete the task we needed to use some logical thinking. I was very impressed by your reasoning and determination!

Finally, we rounded the week of with finishing our big art, creating our time capsule envelopes which we started last week, and you had a lesson from Sportscape all about basketball.

Have a wonderful weekend,

Miss P