Year 5 News 13.01.23

Year 5, I am so proud of you. It was a class worship yesterday, and you demonstrated how we are becoming leading lights in our community and our world by helping to save the bees. You channelled the message of Joshua 1:9 which says: ‘Be bold and courageous. Do not be frightened. Do not be dismayed for the Lord your God is with you’ as you stood in front our school and parents to spread our important message and tell everyone about the Sunflower Power Competition. This message came across loud and clear. I'm sure we will get lots of entries for this year’s sunflower competition.

However, our worship was only a small part of our week as we have been busy doing lots of other things. In English this week, we have started our new Talk4Writing unit. In this unit, we will be writing ‘Beat the Monster’ stories. As always, we have begun our unit of work by investigating the model text. We have thought about the vocabulary used within it and brushed up on our dictionary skills to then find synonyms of these words. During our vocabulary investigations, we realised that you can't just pick any synonym you want. You have to make sure that your word choices fit the context of what you are writing about. You did a great job understanding this and we have been able to create a fantastic word bank as a result. Well done team.

In Maths, we started a new topic. For the next couple of weeks, we will be focusing on multiplication and division. So far, we have recapped how to use the grid method to solve a 2 digit by a 2 digit multiplication question. We then moved onto learn the long multiplication method. We practiced how to lay it out correctly and realised the importance of knowing our times tables.

We were also introduced to Elliot this week as we read the first chapter of 'Who Let The Gods Out' which is one of our five favourite books for this term. We have enjoyed meeting Elliot and Virgo, and we get the feeling that this is going to be a funny story.

For this week’s Science lesson, we discussed whether we thought the Earth was flat or spherical. We went outside to find evidence to support our theories and realised that based on what we could see, we could only prove that it was flat. This led us to talk about how scientists use the evidence they have available to support their theories, and we could understand why people may have thought the Earth was flat. We then discussed the different evidence that has been found to support that the Earth is a sphere and decided on the one that was most persuasive. Our Earth, Moon and Space topic continued into our Computing lesson this week too. Before using the iPads to gather research about the solar system, we looked at the relative sizes of each planet by using different spherical objects. We realised that Mercury is a tiny planet. Did you know that if the Earth was the size of a grape, Mercury would be the size of a peppercorn and Jupiter would be the size of a basketball? We found this task fascinating. Next, we started gathering information about a particular planet which we will share with others this week. We learnt some fascinating facts. We will eventually learn how to put this information into an excel spreadsheet and format the data.

In R.E, we started our new unit which is all about the Christian concept of Salvation. In our first lesson, we learnt what salvation meant and used drama to bring the word alive. First, we thought about when people might need rescuing. We all picked grand gestures and heroic rescues for this, so we then thought about how people can be rescued and helped in everyday life. We realised that this happens all the time as we receive and give salvation daily through acts of kindness. Next, we thought about people in the bible who give salvation. Jesus was a common answer, and so we looked at how Jesus offers salvation to Zacchaeus in the form of both physical and spiritual salvation. By the end of the unit, we will be using all our knowledge of answer our big question: What can we learn from Christian works of art about salvation?

We have continued with our Big Art project this week. We have added people to our pots and continued to add ancient Greek inspired patterns and details.

In French, we were learning to count in tens to 100. We also learnt to say – add, subtract, multiply, divide and equals in French.

And finally, we had a visitor this week. PC Nick visited us to talk about Road Safety. Positive and negative points of walking, cycling, driving to school and catching a bus were discussed. We looked at pictures and decided which ones we felt were safe and unsafe. We shared situations where we have felt that adults and children were being unsafe on the roads. Spotting hazards from selected pictures was another task. We did so well at this. Us wearing our seatbelts will keep us safe on every journey and we should never distract the driver. If on a bike, we know we must wear a helmet whenever we cycle. We need to remember to make smart choices!

I hope you have a fantastic weekend,

Miss Pennance