07.02.2024 Y5 Weekly News

Happy Weekend, Year 5! Yesterday, it was non-uniform day and we all enjoyed using it as a chance to express ourselves or simply feel comfortable as part of Children's Mental Health Week 2025. As part of this special week, we took the opportunity to reflect on our strengths and recognise the things we would like to get better at. I appreciated your openness during our discussions about the emotions related to these goals.

We also celebrated Interfaith Week this week too. This year's focus was all about exploring stories from various faiths. We delved into fascinating tales, including the Indian folklore classic, 'The Blind Men and the Elephant,' alongside stories from Islam about The Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) and the Ants and The Crying Camel. They taught us the importance of seeing everybody's point of view and how every creature – big or small – is important.

In our Math lessons, we have ventured into the world of multiplying fractions. It's exciting to see how you've grasped the concepts of multiplying unit fractions, non-unit fractions, and mixed number fractions. One crucial lesson we've learnt is about the importance of not changing the denominator when multiplying fractions.

In English, we continued to be inspired by our vehicle text 'FArTHER'. For the next few weeks, we will be learning how to write formal letters. This week, we focused on the use of formal language, and we continued honing our knowledge and ability to write embedded relative clauses during our sentence accuracy work. In Book Club, we have been enjoying reading our own stories, and it's been fab to see the range of wonderful books people are reading.

This week, we also had a Heartsmart lesson where we focused on being safe online. It was fascinating to learn about digital footprints and how everything we do online leaves a trace. You did a fantastic job creating posters that highlight how to stay safe on the internet. I was impressed by your creativity and the essential tips you included!

In our recorder learning this week, we recapped the pentatonic notes from last week, played Old MacDonald had a farm and Baby Shark. The tempo of Baby Shark is very fast, so we slowed it right down and split it into parts for us to focus on. We are noticing how tricky re-placing the fingers on our right hand is when we need to play notes D and F, after playing note G.

In Tuesday's PE lesson, you officiated your own matches of dodgeball with British Dodgeball rules. You worked hard to include some tactics (either developed yourselves or the tactics you were introduced to at the start) to improve your game, and the teams worked on showing respect and good sportsmanship to each other, the different teams and the referees.

In Computing, we commenced a new unit on coding. We discussed how vital it is to provide step-by-step instructions, which is a key aspect of programming. It was thrilling to watch you programme an avatar to move around the screen using the skills we have developed. Keep up the fantastic work!

BINGO! We all shouted this in our French lesson! Continuing with our On the Move unit, we continued learning about modes of transport. We recapped how un/une come before the noun. Of the words we learnt, on foot is the odd one out as it is spelt – à pied.We enjoyed applying our knowledge to a game of bingo. We had the French transport names on our boards, and we were shown one transport picture at a time, which we then had to cross off our boards. This task allowed us to see which transport names we need to try and remember.

Our Earth, Moon and Space topic continued this week. We looked at the relative sizes of each planet by using different spherical objects. We realised that Mercury is a tiny planet. Did you know that if the Earth was the size of a marble, Mercury would be the size of a peppercorn and Jupiter would be the size of a basketball? We found this task fascinating. Next, we started gathering information about the planets in our solar system and couldn't believe how long some of the days and years were on these planets.

In art, we have been learning about typography, and we had a go at creating some letters ourselves.

I hope you have an amazing weekend.

See you all on Monday,

Miss Pennance