Y5 Weekly News 07.06.24

Welcome back, Year 5! I hope you all had a lovely half term break. Can you believe we are now in the last term together. The time is flying by, just like this week has!

To start off the week, we went back down to the moss for our penultimate John Muir session. The night before, Mrs Tibbetts set up a moth trap, so on our arrival we went to investigate. This time, luck was on our side as there were several amazing moths to look at. Next, we moved onto land surveys. Using sticks and string, we marked out a square metre, and once this was established, we got to work counting the different types of grass we could see, the percentage of bare earth and the number of wildflowers that were in our patch. After that, we used information about the moss to write poems. It was a lovely way to start off our week.

This week, our main focus in maths has been on decimals. We have delved deep into the realm of decimal numbers and explored how to use column addition and subtraction techniques to work with numbers that have different decimal places. Not only have we been tackling calculations with decimals, but we have also applied our newfound knowledge to solve a variety of interesting word problems. It has been great to see how you have been able to use your skills in real-life scenarios – keep up the fantastic work! Finally, at the end of the week, we jumped into the world of negative numbers.

This week, we were excited to explore a new book in English. The book is called: 'Lost Book of Adventure'. It is a fantastic book with so many beautiful pictures. As part of our lessons, we explored the illustrations and used them as inspiration to create our own words and phrases. Next, imaginations ran wild as we stepped into the pictures from the book, creating freeze frames that captured the essence of each scene. Finally, on Friday, we worked together to write a class poem that linked to one of the illustrations, an illustration of the Amazon rainforest!

For our RE lesson this week, we started a new unit that centres around the events following Pentecost, with a particular focus on St Paul. In this week's lesson, we tested our brains to see what we could remember about the story of Pentecost. It was great to see so many of you sharing what you know, and we enjoyed playing a game as we retold the story.

We jumped straight back into our architecture unit in this week's art lesson, and we were very excited to find out that it was time to start constructing our dream homes. Some of you have embraced the 'dream big' approach, while others opted for the charm of the 'tiny house style'. To create them, you used the 'design and make' method, and you showed remarkable adaptability and flexibility, refining your designs as you brought them to life. I was so impressed by your resilience and determination. You have done an amazing job so far, and I can't wait to see how they will look when they are finished.

In Geography, we completed our second lesson. We started by sharing our experiences of walking through a forest in the UK, which was very interesting. After that, we examined graphs to find out what it was like in the Amazon rainforest. We looked at graphs about precipitation, temperature and levels of sunshine. We concluded that it is very hot and very wet there. Finally, we compared these to the same information about Crewe. The differences were fascinating.

History took us on an adventure through time as we started our new unit all about the Ancient Maya civilization. For this first lesson, we looked at when in history the Ancient Maya era was, and we used timelines to explore this. We also considered where they were from, and then we pretended we were travel agents and created leaflets to share as much information as we could.

In Music,, we have begun mastering a new wood wind instrument the recorder. In this week's lesson, we learnt about the importance of finger placement.

In Science, we planned and carried out experiments! It was exciting and lots of fun. This week, our experiments explored the concept of solubility. To ensure the validity of our experiments, we prioritized the principles of fair testing. We understood the importance of changing only one variable at a time while keeping all other factors constant such as the amount of solvent used, the temperature, and the stirring technique. In the experiment, we tested the solubility of flour, sugar, chalk and much more. Not everything reacted the way we had predicted! Through these hands-on experiences, we not only deepened our understanding of solubility but also honed our scientific inquiry skills. It was also lots of fun too.

Hope you have a fantastic weekend,

Miss Pennance

P.S – This week's home is on Maths.co.uk