Welcome Back Year 5

Welcome back, Year 5! I hope you have had a wonderful half term!

We jumped straight back into learning on Monday, and our first lesson was maths. This weekend we finished our unit on fraction and began our new unit which is all about decimals. To finish our fractions unit, we had two lessons to complete. Our first was all about learning how to find the whole, and the second was learning about fractions as operators. Once we'd done those, it was time for our end of unit check where we show what we know. By Tuesday, it was time to learn about decimals. So far, we have recapped the place value of decimals, and we have recapped what a tenth is.

In Book Club, our focus this week has been comprehension. Our lessons have been about an interesting book called 'The Infinite Lives of Maisie Day'. We began by discussing what the title meant, and we predicted what we think is going to happen. Our theories are interesting, and we're looking forward to seeing what happens.

The mystery of 'The Hound of the Baskervilles' is still our focus in English. This time, our final piece is going to be a formal report where we are going to be sending an update of what's been going on to Sherlock Holmes. Exciting! So far, we have been using the original text to help us gather ideas, and we have been learning about formal language. It's been a great start to our new unit.

Excitingly, we have also had our first John Muir session this week. For this session, we were introduced to what the John Muir award is, what will be doing and who John Muir was. We are looking forward to our first walk around the moss next week.

In PE this week, we have started a new unit which is called invasion games. For this week's lesson, we our focus was basket ball. We practised dribbling skills and played some fun games. In your lesson with Coach James, your focus was on hockey where dribbling was another key focus.

Creativity has also been a theme this week as DT and art were key focuses. In our DT lessons, we have been designing our cushions ready to start creating them next week. In art, we have been learning about typography, and we had a go at creating some letters ourselves.

For RE, we have been learning about the Kingdom of God. Using the parables and the beatitudes, we wrote down what we thought it was like. We then looked at the story of the mustard seed which was a wonderful metaphor. Inspired by this story, we decided to create our own tree to share what we think the Kingdom of God is like.

Our computing lesson this week gave us an introduction to programming digital puzzles in Code Studio. We practised adding blocks to create a code to move characters around a maze. We also were given the task to debug or fix a problem in a program. We used the step button tool to check our code as we worked out how to move characters in different directions. 

In French, we have recapped methods of transport so we can ask each other how we travel to school and we can respond appropriately. Interestingly, quite a few travel by helicopter 

In PHSE, yhis week we have considered how looking at things from different perspectives can give us a better understanding of a situation. After discussing the importance of this in our everyday lives where fall outs can occur, we used role play to resolve an imaginary scenario, and then tried to consider how we could use this to help us resolve our own issues in the future. There are always two sides to a story and none is more important than the other. This liked to the passage: 'Love does not count up wrongs that have been done' from 1 Corinthians 13:4-5.

For our first music lesson of this half-term, we listen to, and appraised a song called 'Erie Canal.' We learnt how the history of this song goes way back to the the early 19th century. Overall, this reggae song was not one of our main favourites., but we do now have an appreciation of how reggae music sends messages regarding: social issues, poverty, positive thinking and having fun. We associate reggae music with the well-known singer, Bob Marley. We discussed the similarities in the lyrics to other reggae songs we know. 

Finally, our homework for this week is on Spagtastic.com.

I hope you're all having a great weekend,

Miss Pennance