Welcome back to Spring Term
Welcome back to Spring Term in Year 5. We have been so impressed with how well the children have settled back into school and their willingness to learn and take on new challenges. The children have already made so much progress with their learning. We hope you enjoy reading about some of their successes below.
Miss Khan, Miss Mason, Mr Clarke and Mrs Gibson
English
In English lessons, we have been learning about explanation texts. We started by watching some short videos from ‘Wallace and Gromit’s Cracking Contraptions’. Wallace wrote us a letter challenging us to create our very own invention and explain how it works.
The children needed to explore a range of explanation texts and pick out the key features of them. We noticed that they all use the following:
- A heading, subheadings and paragraphs to organise the text
- A diagram or ‘blueprint’
- Use of brackets to add detail
- Technical vocabulary
- Cause and effect conjunctions
- Present tense
- Relative clauses
We spent time learning about each of these features before designing and writing about our own inventions. The children really enjoyed this topic and had some excellent invention ideas such as a machine that can do your homework or cook you breakfast in the morning. We hope you enjoy seeing a few of the final explanation texts the children created.
For the rest of this half term the children are going to be exploring a ‘beat the baddie’ text which is based on Beowulf. This is an exciting unit with plenty of action for the children to write about!
Reading
In Reading, we started by exploring the poetry book ‘Overheard in a Tower Block.’ It is a collection of poems written by Joseph Coelho. The poet describes his childhood experiences growing up in London. He shares the joys and the hardships he experienced as well as of those around him. During this unit, children enjoyed engaging in booktalk, visualising, comparing and contrasting poems as well as performing poetry.
Children are currently reading the book ‘The Promise’ by Laura Carlin. It is a picture book which focuses on imagery and has a deep moral story. Within this unit, children will learn some of the following skills:
- Responding to illustrations
- Making predictions
- Visualising
- Reading with fluency and expression
- Exploring characters
- Hot seating in the role of the character and freeze framing
- Conscience alley
- Retrieval practice
- Writing in role as the character
- Exploring themes
Science
In Science, we are learning about the different types of forces. We began by revisiting pulling, pushing and twisting forces. Children have planned their own investigations to show their understanding of different forces acting on objects such as gravity, friction, air resistance and water resistance. Have a look at some examples below:
Maths
In maths this term, we started with a multiplication and division unit. We looked at how to multiply two digit numbers with up to four digit numbers. The topic started with us learning how to use the column method and we applied our new learning to solve multi-step problems. We then learnt how to effectively divide numbers up to four digits. We are now currently on our second unit of fractions. We have started using fractions as operators and we are learning how to find a fraction of a quantity. Children have really enjoyed representing numbers in different ways and learning how to simplify fractions to make the questions easier to understand.
History
At the start of the term, we finished our unit on Anglo-Saxons. We are now currently learning about the Vikings. The unit started with how the Vikings invaded England. We then moved on to exploring how they traded and changed the structure of England. The children have really enjoyed looking at Viking longships and learning about how Vikings would store hoards of objects that they had raided from other civilizations.