Y5 Weekly News 15.03.24

Happy Friday, Year 5! It has been another busy and wonderful week. This week we have been to the moss, welcomed a special guest and much, much more.

Let's start with our second John Muir session which happened at the very beginning of the week. This session was our conversation task. For the task, we had to preserve the land by removing trees. This involved cutting down trees by using loppers and saws! You worked together well, and you did a great job using the equipment accurately and safely. Once felled, we then had to cut the trees into smaller chunks and put them onto the fire. You may think cutting down trees is a strange thing to do when conserving nature, but it is very important on the moss because trees drink lots of water which means there wouldn't be a moss! As a reward for all your hard work, we got to toast and eat marshmallows at the end. Yummy!

In maths, we have continued learning about decimals. Our focus this week has been on ordering, comparing and rounding decimals.

In English, we have planned and started writing our Sherlock Holmes inspired reports. You have all found your reporting style, and it has been a real treat to read what you have written this week. Well done, team!

In our afternoons, we have been busy bees. On Monday and Thursday, we have been working on our DT projects. Using the print blocks that we made last week, we used printing ink to print our main design onto our cushion fabric. We are now just waiting for the ink to dry before we can begin stitching next week.

For your PHSE lesson, we thought about the different emotions we all feel. You shared stories of when you had felt some big emotions that had made you act in certain ways. When we looked at the quote from Dondi Scumaci, you decided that it meant that it's ok to feel all these emotions that we have but we mustn't let them control us. We talked about situations on the playground when we thought we could've acted differently if we'd taken a moment to think before we acted, and some shared that they like to draw or colour or spend some time alone to help them with some of their emotions sometimes. Finally, we talked about how learning to manage our emotions is part of growing up as we'll always feel them, but we don't always want them to "drive" our actions. This links to the bible reference: 'Love does not count up wrongs that have been done' from 1 Corinthians 13:4-5.

In our "On The Move" unit this week, we have learnt some new body parts and actions. We warmed up with a song they know before adding lots of new words to our vocabulary. The children worked to make some instructions such as "pliez les genoux." To push yourselves, we added in our direction vocabulary from last week "tendez la main a droite." We will do some more work on this next lesson.

In History, we continued to think about how the Ancient Greeks have influence our lives today. In this lesson, we focused on the Greek alphabet. Did you know that the name of our own alphabet comes from the Greek letters alpha and beta? We had a go at writing our names in Greek and translating Greek words into English.

In RE, we continued thinking about why Christians think Jesus's death and resurrection is a victory. To do this, we compared three different versions of the Easter story. The first version was a story called 'The Garden, The Curtain and The Cross'. Next, we watched a video of the Easter story, and finally we read a passage from the bible about it. We identified the similarities and differences and concluded that in all of them, Jesus's death brings God's kingdom to us on Earth which Christians definitely feel is a victory.

On Thursday, PE and Computing occupied our afternoons. In PE, you enjoyed learning and playing hockey with Coach James, and in Computing, we learnt about 'events' and how they can be used in programming.

For Art this week, we have been learning about different types of sketching pencils. We experimented with them whilst mark making and finally used them to create pencil drawings.

Finally, our Friday was filled with lots of science fun because this week it has been Science Week. For one of our activities, we learnt and experimented with time! To experiment with time, we created pendulums. We then tried to find different ways to make the pendulum swing for a longer or shorter amount of time. In the afternoon, we welcome a special guest to our class as Mr Cockram came to teach us about pressure. We learnt that pressure is an important part of so many everyday items, and we watched in amazement at the fantastic demonstrations. After finding out all about it, we became rocket scientists and helped Mr Cockram launch rockets! It was great fun and extremely exciting. We had a great time and would all like to say a huge thank you to Mr Cockram for volunteering his time to some and see us – thank you!

I hope you have an amazing weekend,

Miss Pennance