Happy New Year Y5 07.01.22

Happy New Year! I hope you has a wonderful Christmas break. It was so lovely seeing you all and being able to welcome my Year 5 family back into the classroom.

We started the week off with a very exciting activity as we had our first Forest School session. It was a chilly morning, but it was worth being outside as we got to take part in so many fantastic activities. These included searching the grounds for things we knew the names of and things we didn't. Then, Mr Hadfield told us all about the things we had found. Did you know that stickyweed's really name is cleaver? We also talked about animals and their habitats. We talked about hedgehogs and why owls find it more difficult to survive in the winter. We then went on to learnt how to tie knots used knowledge to build shelters.

On Wednesday afternoon, we jumped into our new topic .... Ancient Greece! First, we jotted down what we already knew about the era. I am proud to say that you all knew a lot! You talked about the Olympics and were also able to name some of the Greek Gods. Next, we were introduced to Elliot as we read the first chapter of 'Who Let The Gods Out' which is one of our five favourite books for this term. We finished the afternoon off by starting our Big Art project. This involved doing some research into Ancient Greek pots as we will be painting giant versions of them for our classroom. You looked at different pot style and noticed that all elements of Greek life were depicted (pictorially) on them. You used this knowledge to help you design the pot your table will be decorating next.

P.E, P.S.H.E and Computing filled our other afternoons. In P.E, you did yoga as a warm up and then moved on to complete an orienteering challenge. This took resilience and team work to complete and you did a great job. In P.S.H.E, we reflected upon our learning from last term and started the first lesson of this term's unit 'Too Much Selfie Isn't Healthy. In the lesson, we talked about the gifts we have been give – such as kindness – and how we can share them with others. In Computing, we recapped our key vocabulary before we were introduced to the term 'while loop'. This is when a loop is created which continues as long as the programmed conditions are being met. We practiced coding with 'while loops' as we helped a character collect her crops. It was fab to see your logical thinking and how you tested your ideas, spotted the bugs in your code and debugged them.

Area and perimeter have been the focus of our maths lessons this week. In particular, we have been learning how to find the perimeter of squares and rectangles. During our lessons, we learnt that we can use different formulas to get the answer. We discussed what the most efficient method was and then used this in our to answer questions.

In English, we recapped the SPaG features we learnt last term and used them to write a recount of our Christmas holiday. It's been so lovely reading them and finding out about all the wonderful things you've been up too.

I hope you all have a great weekend and I can't wait to see you Monday for our first full week,

Miss P