Y5 News 17.03.23

This week we had our theme day! This was a very exciting day. We all dressed up in our Ancient Greek outfits. It was amazing to see all your costumes and the imaginative things you used to create them! During the day, we learnt about the Ancient Greek gods and goddesses and took part in a quiz race to answer questions and beat our opponents. After learning about the Olympians, we then created a set of top trump cards and played a few games with them. After break, we battled against each other in the 'Colossal Column Challenge'. We learnt about the Parthenon and then used sugar paper and masking take to create a temple structure. We tested the integrity of each temple by seeing how many books it would hold. Ourrecord was 44! It was a fab day, and I hope you all enjoyed it.

In Maths, perseverance and resilience were needed once again as we mastered the skill of subtracting fractions. We took it one step at a time and decided that we preferred converting our mixed number fractions into improper fractions. By the end of the week, we had become more confident and began to use our skills to tackle one and two step word problems.

This week, we were visited by Mrs Tibbetts who works for Natural England. She came to introduce us to the John Muir Award. This is a wonderful project that Year 5 will be taking part in during the Spring and Summer. The award will help us learn about our natural environment and help us learn how to protect it. During the introduction session, we were excited to hear about all the wonderful things we will doing, and we can't wait to get started.

In English, we finished our 'shared text'. You worked hard to use the skills and techniques we have learnt to craft your writing. It was great to see subordinating and coordinating conjunctions as it meant you were using simple, compound and complex sentences (our writing focus). I could also clearly see the key layout features and parenthesis in your writing too. Well done, team. At the end of the week, it was time to do your independent piece which we call our 'Hot Write'. So far, we have planned our hot write and will start writing it next week.

It was Science Week this week. Science Week 2023 is all about connections. As we have been studying space in science, we considered how the moon connects us all. We decided it connected us by controlling the tides around the world, and that it is something that we can all see at night. We then went on to learn about moon phases. We learnt that the moon takes a whole month to rotate! We also learnt that the moon is a satellite that reflects the sun's light (it doesn't create its own light). We talked about how the moon changes throughout a month and learnt about how it waxes and wanes as the reflection of the sun's light gets bigger and smaller. Finally, we created a moon dial to help us identify the different stages of the moon.

In D.T, we printed our designs onto our cushions ready to start sewing next lesson. How exciting!

In R.E, we paused our learning on Islam, and returned to our Salvation unit to complete our end of unit assessment. To do this, we finished our beautiful pieces of artwork and then wrote an explanation of how our artwork shows salvation. You work looks beautiful, and I'm so impressed by how hard you have worked on them.

In MyHappyMind this week, we learnt how we can use our new skills of seeing something from another person's perspective to build friendships. When we make friends with someone it is usually because of their character strengths. We might choose a friend based on their bravery or their kindness. We all choose friends based on different characters strengths and that's ok.

In Computing, we learnt more about loops and how to implement them in Blockly code. Using loops is an important skill in programming because manually repeating commands is tedious and inefficient. With these Code.org puzzles, we learnt how to add instructions to existing loops, gather repeated code into loops, and recognize patterns that need to be repeated.

We had our first Cricket session with Harry this week. We had fun taking part in warm up games, practicing our throwing and catching skills and learning how to bat. At the end of the lesson, we put all our training into practice and had a mini game of cricket.

How do you say?... This was the next part of our French unit. We had a set of words written in French, and we used a French Dictionary to translate these words to English.

Chord G7 was our new learning in music this week. We practised playing G7 and we found placing our fingers onto the ukulele strings rather tricky. Looking at the shape on our fretboard picture, visualising the positions as a triangle helped us greatly. We persevered and played chord G7 throughout the song, One Man Went to Mow. Well done year 5!

I hope you have a fab weekend,

Miss Pennance