14th October 2022Shuhana Islam

Hello and welcome to our first blog of the school year!

Linden, Hawthorn and Beech class have all made an absolutely brilliant start to the year! All of the teachers are very proud of the children and the great learning which has taken place already. Please do enjoy reading about a few of our highlights below.

PSHE- Building Resilience

For the first two weeks of the Autumn term, we focused our afternoon lessons on the theme of resilience. The aim of these lessons is to develop the children’s growth mindset towards their learning. The children discussed strategies to help them cope with difficult situations and using their favourite ideas, they created a resilience wheel. We also learnt about how to build resilience when faced with challenges. The Learning Pit teaches us that we have to fail in order to eventually succeed. The children had fun creating their own learning pits. We also looked at diversity and its importance in our community. The children created some beautiful posters to celebrate diversity.

 

English- Poetry and Spook-tacular Stories!

In English, we have been writing our own poems based on The River by Pie Corbett. The children included various poetic features including alliteration and similes and their amazing work was even commented on by Pie Corbett on Twitter!

We then went onto writing the opening and build up of own suspense stories. It’s been great fun learning about ways to engage the reader and how to build tension and suspense into our writing. We learnt that writers can weave in rhetorical questions, short sentences, clues to tantalise the reader, onomatopoeia, similes, metaphors and personification. The children have worked incredibly hard to include these in their independent writing, why not ask your child about which features they have included in their work this week.

Topic- Tomb Raiders!

The children have enjoyed learning about Ancient Egypt through a variety of cross-curricular activities. They first went on an exciting scavenger hunt around the school to find the definitions of key words such as archeologist, tomb and sphinx. We have also explored key physical features and locations in Ancient Egypt by studying several maps and artefacts. The children thoroughly enjoyed drawing their own cartouches to demonstrate their understanding of hieroglyphics too. Take a look at some of the fantastic work below!

Science- May the Force Be With You!

This half term we have been developing our understanding about forces. We have revisited, as well as learnt some new, key vocabulary and tried to remember the different types of forces around us. We discussed the terms “balanced” and “unbalanced” forces and used everyday objects to demonstrate this new concept. We learnt about Sir Isaac Newton and how he developed his theory of gravity. Following this, we explored the effect of gravity with objects in the classroom. We identified the difference between Mass and Weight and used Newton meters to find a correlation between the two. We then moved onto learning about Galileo and his discovery that gravity causes objects of the SAME size and SHAPE, regardless of their MASS to fall at the same rate.

This week we will be investigating the effects of air resistance by making parachutes of varied sizes, shapes and materials and testing how quickly (or slowly!) they fall to the ground.

Finally, we are very much looking forward to seeing you all at Parents’ Evening next Tuesday and Wednesday. As ever, thank you for all your support and if you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask your child’s class teacher.

The Year 5 Team 🙂