Year 5 News 10.03.23

Happy Friday!

I didn't get to teach Harry Potter, Spiderman or Quil from Guardians of the Galaxy this week, but I did get to teach all of you which is even more special. You have all worked very hard this week, and I am impressed by how resilient you have been when facing new learning challenges this week.

We came up against our first learning challenge in Maths because our lessons this week have all been about adding fractions. It required us to use our prior knowledge of finding common denominators, simplifying fractions and converting improper fractions to mixed number fractions. We used these skills to learn how to add mixed number fractions which have different denominators. We took it step by step, and once we practised this, we started to feel more confident. Great work, team!

In English, we boxed up our model text to consider what type of information needs to be shared in each section. Once this was complete, it was time to move onto planning our own piece. To do this, we gathered facts about the planet Mars; we learnt some interesting things. By Wednesday, it was time to start writing. So far, we have written the first two sections. It has been lovely to see you using your knowledge of compound, complex and simple sentence within your work.

In MyHappyMinds this week, we continued with our 'Relate' unit. Our lesson this included thinking about how we can use our strengths to help us relate to people in different situations.

Monday afternoon was a peaceful one. We painted our pieces of Christian artwork. As the afternoon went on, your pieces came alive. It was lovely to see you thinking carefully about your colour choices as you used them to symbolise salvation. Once these were complete, we left them to dry and moved onto finishing our print blocks for our D.T cushion.

On Tuesday, Geography and PSHE were our foci. In Geography, we continued with our unit about the Alpine region. Last time, we learnt where the Alps are. In this lesson, we learnt how they were formed. The Alps are an example of fold mountains that were created over 30 million years go. You then used playdough to make tectonic plates which allowed you to recreate how they were formed. In PSHE, we learnt about when, how and who to ask for help. It is important to remember that we all have times in our lives when we need support and advice from someone else. This is completely normal and is helpful no matter how old we are. We learnt that It is important that we learn to love and look after ourselves and part of this is knowing when we need to ask for help, or to put it another way knowing we need to let love in! It reminds us of the Proverb 4:23: 'Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.'

On Wednesday, it was time for French, Music and P.E. In our ukulele lesson, we continued to practise changing from chord C to chord F and vice-versa. The hardest part so far, was moving our fingers to play chord F to C. We know that working hard and persevering will help us improve. In French we continued learning how to answer questions about where we live. In partners, we worked on ordering the answer about where we live. We had to include our house name or number (some of us made an address up). We worked really hard to have a free flowing conversation.

In Thursday's Computing lesson, we finished creating our GoogleSheets about the Solar System.

Finally, on Friday, we covered R.E and Science. In Science, we learnt about night and day. We learnt that the Earth spins on its axis, and the side of the Earth facing the Sun is experiencing day whereas the side facing away from the Sun is experiencing night. We wrote a paragraph to explain this and drew our own diagrams demonstrate this too. In R.E, we started our new unit on Islam. We were introduced to the 5 pillars of Islam and learnt that these 5 pillars underpin the key beliefs of this faith.

I hope you have a fantastic weekend,

Miss Pennance