Years 5 Weekly News 14.03.25

Happy Friday, Year 5! It has been another busy and wonderful week. This week, we have been to the Wybunbury Moss, enjoyed Science Week, and much more.

Let's start with our second Wybunbury Moss session, which happened at the very beginning of the week. This session was our conservation task. For the task, we had to preserve the land by removing trees. This involved cutting down trees using loppers and saws! You worked together well, and you did a great job using the equipment accurately and safely. You may think cutting down trees is a strange thing to do when conserving nature, but it is very important on the moss because trees drink lots of water, which means there wouldn't be a moss! As a reward for all your hard work, we got to toast and eat marshmallows at the end.

In Maths this week, we moved on to rounding decimals with two decimal places. We learned how to round to the nearest whole number and tenth. We explored percentages and learned that percentages can only be out of 100. We used bar models and 100 squares to help us identify them too. Finally, we learned how to match fractions with their equivalent decimals and percentages.

In our English lessons this week, we have continued to explore The Promise by Nicola Davies. At the start of the week, we investigated an example text that showed us what a good 'narrative description' looks like. We then unpicked the writing tools within it and had a go at using them ourselves as we wrote a setting description. Your work is fantastic so far, and I can't wait for us to start writing the main piece.

In RE, we continued thinking about why Christians believe Jesus's death and resurrection is a victory. To do this, we compared three different versions of the Easter story. The first version was a story called The Garden, The Curtain and The Cross. Next, we watched a video of the Easter story, and finally, we read a passage from the Bible about it. We identified the similarities and differences and concluded that, in all of them, Jesus's death brings God's kingdom to us on Earth, which Christians definitely feel is a victory.

In PSHE, we discussed the legacy of Nelson Mandela. We talked about what we already knew and then looked into the important impact he had in the fight against apartheid. We considered some quotes from Mandela and asked ourselves what the quotes teach us about forgiveness and what might have happened if Nelson Mandela had left prison and started a war instead of offering forgiveness. This links to the Bible reference: Love does not count up wrongs that have been done. (1 Corinthians 13:4-5).

In PE, you worked on the footwork rules in netball. We talked about the terms 'landing foot,' 'pivot,' and 'stepping' and practiced keeping your landing foot still and pivoting before passing the ball. We had a carousel of three activities to work on passing and intercepting, shooting, and footwork.

We listened to a piece of 20th-century orchestral music this week. This piece of music was composed by a lady called Florence Price. She set out to use her music to bring about change. She was the first African American woman to have a symphony performed by a major orchestra in America. When listening to her composition, we could identify when trumpets were played using a mute. We could also hear when violins were played using a technique called pizzicato. This is where the violin strings are plucked instead of being played with a bow. We also noticed where the music changed from a major key to a minor key.

In Art, we added the finishing touches to our amazing maps! They look brilliant, and it is great to see how you have used typography to add meaning to your writing. Our next step will be to evaluate our work, which we will be doing next week.

In History, it was time for us to 'show what we know' in our end-of-unit check. For this, we all answered the question, "What do we have in our lives today that we can thank the Ancient Greeks for?" We all agreed that our lives today have been influenced by the Ancient Greeks. Areas with Ancient Greek influences include our language, our architecture, our political system, and finally, the Olympics!

We started our new Geography unit this week. In our Geography lessons, we will be learning all about the UK and where we live. In this lesson, we learned about where our school is. As part of our lesson, we learned the difference between the British Isles, the United Kingdom, and Great Britain. It was wonderful to see you using maps to identify where we live, including our region and county too. Well done, team.

We kicked off our new unit on flat file databases, which has been quite an adventure. Initially, we created our very own paper databases. This hands-on experience was enlightening as we sorted through information, trying to locate specific details. However, we quickly discovered that searching manually on paper isn't the fastest way to find what we need! Through this exercise, we learned important terms such as 'field,' 'record,' and 'database,' which are crucial to understanding how databases work. In our second lesson of the week, we took a step further and explored computer databases. It was fascinating to compare how they differ from our paper versions. We looked at how technology can help us retrieve information much more efficiently, which made our previous paper sorting feel a bit slow by comparison!

Finally, we celebrated Science Week on Friday. We enjoyed exploring a range of Science books in book club. For our Science Week lesson, our focus has been on the fascinating topic of adaptations, and it has been absolutely wonderful to see everyone's enthusiasm and creativity.

We began the lesson by learning about how different animals are specially adapted to thrive in their unique environments. From Arctic foxes with their warm fur to camouflaged chameleons, it has been interesting to explore how these traits help animals survive. We engaged in discussions and watched videos that illustrated these concepts beautifully.

Finally, we got the chance to create our very own imaginary animals! It was delightful to see your imaginative ideas come to life. I was particularly impressed with how many of you incorporated specific adaptations that would help your animals in their chosen habitats. It was a brilliant opportunity for everyone to express their creativity while applying what we had learned.

I hope you all have a fantastic weekend,

Miss Pennance