Year 5 Weekly News 28.03.25

Happy Friday everybody!

In Maths this week, we have continued learning about area and perimeter. Our focus has been on understanding perimeter -- the total distance around the edge of a shape. We began by calculating the perimeter of rectangles, using the formula (length x2) + (width -- 2), and then moved on to more complex rectilinear shapes. We carefully added up the lengths of all the sides to find the total perimeter, making sure not to miss any edges. It's been fantastic to see you using your reasoning skills to work out missing side lengths and solve perimeter problems with confidence!

In English, we have been working hard on our writing skills, focusing on character narratives and now we're moving on to a new writing outcome based on Nicola Davies' 'The Promise'. Our next writing project will involve crafting letters inspired by the story. We have explored an example text – which demonstrates what a good one looks like – and we have unpicked the new vocabulary we found within it. We discussed what makes a good letter too.

In RE this week, we have been learning about the events of Easter and how Christians celebrate it in church. We learnt about the different events of Holy Week. We learnt that Christians believe Jesus' death and resurrection were a great victory, and this is shown in the special services and colours used in church. For example, on Palm Sunday, we learnt that churches use red to remember Jesus arriving in Jerusalem. On Good Friday, a sad day, churches can be dressed in black. Then on Easter Sunday, everything changes to white and gold as Christians celebrate Jesus coming back to life! Churches are filled with music, joy, and candles to show that Jesus has defeated death and brought hope to the world! We then listened to different Easter songs and considered how they celebrate this wonderful event.

In our PHSE lesson this week, we talked about mistakes. We realised that if we try to cover them up it can get worse, but if we let go of it, we can move on. We decided that the title of the lesson, "I did, not I am," means that mistakes don't make us who we are, and we shouldn't carry them around and make us feel sad or shameful or embarrassed. We should reflect on them, talk about them and then let them go because we learn from them. No matter what we do, there is always a way through. Remember, 'Love does not count up wrongs that have been done.' 1 Corinthians 13:4-5.

On Tuesday's PE lesson, after a warmup game to improve our passing precision and speed, we played some shooting games, some passing games and some 5v5 games where we were introduced to 5 positions and the different rules for each of those playing positions – GK, GA, GD, GS, C. Today we were trying to take our message from Mrs Ward's worship which was to spread words of encouragement and put it into action on the netball court. On Thursday's PE lesson, we have practised defending using jockeying which is a way or forcing an attacker in a certain direction by blocking their desired path. We worked on this skill in small groups in hockey, football and basketball before playing some small matches against each other in the same three sports.

As well as having two PE lessons this week, we also had two French lessons. In our first lesson, we recapped the different modes of transport in French before asking, "Comment vas-tu a l'ecole?" You responded in simple sentences using the verb 'to go' and their chosen mode of transport before using the worksheets to practice their written responses. In our second lesson, we practised some essential phrases: "Tournez à gauche" (turn left), "Tournez à droite" (turn right), and "Allez tout droit" (go straight ahead) as our lesson focus was all about directions. During our lesson, we turned it into a fun game of "chaud ou froid" (hot or cold), where you directed each other around the classroom. Your ability to guide one another was not only a testament to your understanding of the language, but it also created a lively and collaborative atmosphere in our class.

This week, in Geography, we continued learning about our local area using the fantastic digimaps app as our guide. During our lesson, we focused on using grid references to pinpoint specific locations. It was wonderful to see you engage with this activity and work together to find the grid reference for various places, including the fascinating Wybunbury Moss.

In this week's computing lesson, we dove back into the world of flat file databases, and I was thrilled to see what you all thought! We focused on sharpening our search techniques to find the answers we needed in our data. You all played around with some advanced techniques that helped you search across multiple fields, which is a super handy skill to have.

In this week's science lesson, you have been learning about the different phases of the moon, identifying each stage from the New Moon to the Full Moon and everything in between. To make this learning experience even more engaging, you split into teams and created diagrams that illustrate these phases. It was wonderful to see the collaboration and creativity you exhibited as you worked together to produce informative and visually appealing diagrams.

I hope you all have a fantastic weekend,

Miss Pennance