Year 5 Weekly News

Happy Friday everybody!

We have had a very special week this week! As well as our normal P.E sessions, we also got to have a go at some taekwondo! This was very exciting. We were taught some beginner moves and had a go at them ourselves.

During our other afternoon lessons, we focused on Music, History, R.E, Art and Computing. In Computing, we began creating our GoogleSlide presentations on Victorian life. We learnt how to format slide backgrounds, insert and format text and insert pictures. There was lots of new learning, and it was lovely to see you working together to help each other. In Art, we learnt about block printing. We created our own small printing block (a prototype) and had a go a creating repeat, half drop, full drop or random patterns. I look forward to seeing what your William Morris inspired wall paper prints will look like! In R.E, we have been looking at Moses. The story of Moses and the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt shared how Moses stood up for what was right and helped save people. We realised that another person in the bible also stood up for what was right and saved people . . . Jesus! As part of the lesson, we compared Jesus and Moses and realised that there are parallels in their stories. It was very interesting to find this out. In History, we continued looking at the British Empire during the Victorian times. We learnt that India was the jewel in the crown of the empire and we delved into why this was the case. We considered the impact of India's colonisation and realised it had both negative and positive effects. In Music, we played notes D, E and F on the glockenspiel. Our listen and respond task saw us appraising a gospel song. We decided the theme was about Jesus looking after a sparrow left on earth.

This week, we also had our second 'MyHappyMind' lesson. During this lesson, we recapped what Team H-A-P was. We remembered that the amygdala is the brain's body guard and that this can jump into fight, flight or freeze mode which makes the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex go to sleep. As part of our lesson, we learnt about a technique called 'Happy Breathing'. This technique can help us calm down our amygdala and re-waken the other two members of Team H-A-P.

In English this week, we finished our shared write. It was lovely watching you craft your pieces and it was great seeing how proud you were with them. We also planned and wrote our final piece for this unit – our Hot Write! You worked hard to included our key targets and I am already enjoying reading them.

In Maths, we started a new unit. This time, we have been looking at the place value of numbers up to 1,000,000. This has involved comparing and ordering, placing numbers on a number line and also unpicking the value of each digit within a number. We will continue with this unit next week.

I hope you all have a lovely weekend,

Miss P