Year 5 Weekly News 20.09.2024

I hope you're having a wonderful weekend, Year 5. You worked so hard this week. I am so proud of you.

Maths has been super exciting lately! We wrapped up the chapter on six-digit numbers (which was a real brain teaser), and now we're diving headfirst into numbers that go as high as 1,000,000! In this thrilling chapter, we're becoming number detectives. We've compared and ordered these colossal numbers, put them in their proper places on number lines, and figured out the secrets each digit holds.

In English, we've embarked on an exciting journey of planning our very own first-person exploration narratives. This creative process involves gathering ideas from our previous lessons and drawing inspiration from our past experiences. We've even had the opportunity to engage in some writing exercises to ignite our imaginative sparks. I love your plans, and I can't wait for you to start writing now.

For reading this week, we enjoyed reading our own books whilst we took turns reading to an adult. In spellings, we have been learning about silent letters. In particular, we have been focusing on the silent letter 'b'. It comes up in words like 'crumb', 'thumb' and 'comb'.

In our afternoons this week, we have been busy with PSHE, RE, Music, PE, French, Forest Schools, Computing, Wellbeing and Art. Gosh, that's a lot isn't it.

In R.E., our exploration of the Bible continued. We engaged in a silent discussion, where we contemplated five intriguing quotes from the Bible. These quotes provided us with valuable insights into the nature of the Bible itself. Later, we gathered as a class to discuss and share our diverse perspectives.

In PHSE, we looked at the difference between being bossy and being a leader. We talked about how being bossy isn't HeartSmart as it is a way to try and control others, and we thought about how on a good day, the only person we can control is ourselves! We realised that it is important to be a leader rather than a boss because it means we are being HeartSmart as we are considering the person as well as the task. This made us think about the phrase: Do to others as you would have them do to you. Luke 6:31.

In French, we explored and learnt about different French cities. We described what we saw and compared them with cities in the UK. We learnt about the names and their locations, and we began to think about the different sounds we can hear within the names; sounds we have heard before in French words we already know. For example, we spotted the 'ohn' sound in Montpellier and Lyon is the same as in Bonjour. Next week, we will be moving onto asking and answering where someone lives!

In Music, we could not wait to get our hands on our glockenspiels this week in music! Our improvisation task was to use 5 notes to create our own version of the backing track of 'The Ghost Parade.' We are really engaged with this song and cannot wait to play our glockenspiels to it!

We enjoyed another fun session in Forest School this week. For the first part of the session, we recapped the importance of M.R.S G.R.E.N. We then checked whether they clay animals we made last lesson were still safe inside their shelters – and they were! Next, we went around the forest school area to identify living and nonliving items. Finally, we made fires and enjoyed roasting marshmallows.

In our Computing lessons, we delved deeper into the fascinating world of digital systems. This time, we turned our attention to the vast realm of the internet. We discovered that the internet itself operates as a digital system, receiving inputs (like your search query) and producing outputs (like the search results). To put our newfound knowledge into action, we tried our hands at writing precise instructions for conducting a search on a search engine. We quickly learned that the more precise our instructions, the better and more accurate our search results would be.

In Art, we were inspired by the drawings of Vincent van Gogh. We used viewfinders to zoom in on specific areas of his work and closely observed the intricate marks he made. It was fantastic to see you getting hands-on with recreating his techniques to create a page full of different types of mark marking. We then learnt that in this unit, we will be creating art inspired by a poem. We will take our inspiration from 'The Grotlyn,' a delightful poem about a monkey in Victorian London. We explored the text and drew items that inspired us from the fabulous illustrations.

I hope you're having a fabulous weekend!

See you tomorrow,

Miss Pennance