Year 5 Weekly News 03.11.23

Happy Friday, Year 5!

Can you believe we are now in the second part of our Autumn Term? Our first week back after half term has flown by; it'll be Christmas before we know it.

It was an exciting first week back because we went on an adventure to Chester on Thursday. Our adventure took us to the Grosvenor Museum and we meet Mrs Nutting. Mrs Nutting is a Victorian lady who runs a boarding house. We learnt about all the different things that could be found in her house – it was very interesting to see what Victorians used for hot water bottles! After lunch, we went out and about around Chester. We were time detectives and spotted the dates on buildings, and we realised that Chester is full of Victorian buildings! We also visited the Town Hall, and had an impromptu visit from the Lord Mayor Elect of Chester! How exciting! It was wonderful being able to take you out. You were a credit to our school. Thank you, Year 5.

The rest of our week was filled with our usual rhythms and routines. In Maths, we continued learning about addition and subtraction. In particular, we focused on using the inverse operations to help us check our working out. We then moved on to answering multi-step word problems. This took team work and resilience – we also found that using the bar model was a great top tip.

This week our English lessons began in a rather unusual way! As we entered the classroom, we could hear waves crashing and wind howling. Also, set out on a table, there was a mix of random objects such as feathers, a hammer, nuts, bolts and screws. This got our imagination flowing as we started predicting what our next story – the book that will inspire our writing – will be about. There were lots of great ideas! As the week went on, more clues were unveiled and finally we learnt that our new story is called 'FArTHER'. We explored it's beautiful illustrations and brought them to life through drama! To end the week, we created a personification poem inspired by the imagery we could see.

In our Book Club lesson, we have started looking at a very famous book that was written by a very famous Victorian author. I wonder if you can guess its title – the book has ghosts in it and Christmas is an important theme. That's right. . . it's A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. In our lessons, we have read extracts from the book and thought about the type of character Scrooge is and the type of atmosphere the author has been creating.

In R.E this week, we have been looking at world faiths. Our main focus was Judaism. First, we jotted down everything we could remember about it. It was great to see how much you knew. Well done! We remembered that their holy text is called the Torah. As part of our lesson, we considered why the Torah is important to Jewish people. This sparked great discussed and you had lots of excellent suggestions.

In Art, we enjoyed adding to our 'zines' (we began creating before half term). In this lesson, we learnt how to make monoprints. It was great fun, and we loved learning this new technique. It is so exciting to see our zines coming together!

In History, we are now near the end of our unit which meant it was time to consider the legacy of the British Empire. This sparked some interesting discussions about the way it has had a good and bad impact on Britain and the countries it once ruled.

In Science, we have continued learning about forces. In this lesson, you have been learning about friction. As part of the lesson, you have planned an experiment. The aim of will be to see how friction acts upon different objects. We have made our predictions and will be carrying out the experiment next week.

This half term in music we will be learning a new song called, 'The Sparkle in my Life.' This week we looked at the lyric sheet and annotated the parts we thought were important, showed meaning to the song, or any particular words we felt were important.

Finally, on Friday, it was time for PHSE, PE and wellbeing. In P.E, we began our new unit which is all about Hockey. We learnt about the straight dribble and the quick dribbled, and we played a fun game called 'Rob The Nest' where the aim of the game was to get the most balls. In PHSE, we thought about the importance of 'Don't Forget To Let Love In' which is also the title of our new unit. This reminds us that in the bible it says: 'The second command is this: Love your neighbour as you love yourself'. Mark 12:31

I hope you all have a wonderful weekend,

Miss Pennance