Y5 Weekly News 21.06.24

Happy Friday everyone. We have had another great week in Year 5! Let me tell you all about it.

We started our week off by heading down to the moss for our very last session. As we walked around, we thought about how the moss has changed since our first visit back in March. It was definitely much greener. We also saw some creeping cranberry and some cotton grass which we didn't see before. We have loved our John Muir adventures. It has been so wonderful being able to learn about and help conserve a beautiful natural environment which is right on our doorstep. We would like to say a huge thank you to Mrs Tibbetts and the Natural England team for giving us the chance to take part in the John Muir award. We are going to be arranging a sharing session next half term to tell you all about what we have done

In our maths lessons this week, we continued learning about units of measure in maths, and the focus of our lessons has been converting between g and kg, ml and l and mm to m. For us to complete the work successfully, we needed to brush up on our skills of multiplying and dividing by 1000. Once we had refreshed our knowledge, our confidence grew, and we were able to answer word problems too. Well done, team!

Planning and then writing was the focus of our week in English. At the start of the week, we were excited to start planning our survival narratives as we had to think about the exciting but dangerous situations our characters would encounter. Once decided upon, we jumped into writing paragraph one which required us to describe the setting; it was hard to not jump straight into the action! You showed great restraint and have done a wonderful job so far. I can't wait to read more.

In our spelling lessons, we continued learning about the 'shus' sound, but this time it was spelt 'tious'. We were detectives and investigated when to use this grapheme compared to the 'cious' grapheme. Did you know that 'tious' should be used for nouns that end in 'tion'.

On Monday, we learnt about St Paul in R.E. Did you know that St Paul was originally called Saul, a man who persecuted Christians! After God spoke to him, his heart changed, and he became fundamental in helping found the Christian church. We learnt that he did this by preaching, travelling around the Mediterranean and writing letters. Did you know that you can still read Pauls letters today? You can find them in the bible!

This week, we have completed two science lessons. In our first lesson on Monday, we wrapped up our unit on separating materials but completing mind maps to showcase everything we have learnt. In our second lesson, we moved onto a new unit. This is a biology unit, and in this lesson we are learning all about humans. So far, we have learnt about the milestones of babies and children. It was very interesting learning what a baby and child learn to do at each stage! We then used our newfound knowledge to create a fact file.

In PE this week we have continued our rounders unit. WE focussed first on throwing and fielding, working on catching when we're having to move ourselves into the right position to receive the ball. We discussed the importance of communicating with the other fielders so that we can work well as a team so if we found ourselves in the best position a catch a ball, we'd shout our names so that other people would know we're catching. This would avoid accidents but also frees other fielders up. After that, we added in some batting practice before having a game of Danish Long-ball to bring all the skills together.

In French we briefly recapped our last lesson where we had learnt to use the adjective describing an item of clothing after the noun rather than before the noun as we do in English.

We looked again at how some colours change in spelling and pronunciation when they are describing masculine or feminine nouns and then we played a game – "Avez-vous...?" where we had to ask for specific items of coloured clothing in our little shops.

In our PHSE session this week, we started our unit 'No Way Through Isn't True'. In our first lesson, we described situations where we sometimes feel it is too hard or there is no way through. We shared some great examples, and I am so proud of how kind and respectful you were whilst people were sharing. We then worked together to think how we could overcome these difficult situations. This made us realise that there is always a way through, even when it seems impossible. This reminded us of Moses's story where he faced many challenges during his flight from Egypt with the Israelites. The bible reminds us that 'Moses held out his hand over the sea, and the Lord drove the sea back with a strong east wind. It blew all night and turned the sea into dry land. The water was divided Exodus 14:21

On Friday afternoon, we went back in time to the ancient Maya civilization to learn about their remarkable writing system, We learnt about the intricacies of hieroglyphs and glyph blocks. We even had a go at making our own. During the lesson, we also engaged in captivating discussions about the similarities and differences between the Maya writing system and our own.

I hope you;re having a fantastic weekend,

Miss Pennance