Week beginning 16th December
Mrs Carr blog
As I type this, the children are very much engrossed in a Christmas escape room on our last morning in school of 2024. Their focus and determination right up to the end of term is testament to how much they have grown over this very very long term!
We have been super busy with Christmas things this week; carol concert, Christingle and parties! But in amongst that, we have also DT, Science, PE and computing. The work produced by the children has been outstanding considering they are so tired and excited about Christmas.
All that is left to say is thank you for your support this year throughout 2024, your children are just absolutely wonderful! Their enthusiasm and love of learning is fantastic and teaching them is an absolute joy! I wish you all a really Merry Christmas and see you in 2025!
Week beginning 9th December
Year 5 blog
This week was our last week of swimming which meant the most important lesson: life saving! We had to wear shorts and t-shirts to pretend it was like we had "fallen in" and we learned how to keep ourselves safe.
Also, we are starting to welcome Christmas more into the classroom. On Tuesday we were treated to watching the dress rehearsal of the KS1 Nativity which was AMAZING! We have also been practicing hard with our own carol concert (which is next week), and today we started our Friday by making angels with a Year 6 parent! We created some beautiful angels ready for our Christmas trees!
In Gymnastics we learned how to do headstands. We also continued our work on creating shapes with our body, and rolling!
In English, we have been looking at ghost stories with a Christmas theme, and we got to substitute with our own ideas to create a Christmas theme ghost story. But we will need to wait until 2025 to write them!
In a minute, we are going to do our "Look Who's Talking" speeches- wish us luck!
See you next week for the last week of term!
Week beginning 2nd December
Mrs Carr blog
The children have had a very busy week, doing lots of quizzes! I have been really impressed with the children's resilience around these quizzes; and have really enjoyed seeing their progress and successes.
Around all the quizzes, we have found time to do plenty of learning. In Maths, we have finished our unit on multiplying and dividing whole and decimals numbers by 10, 100 and 1000. In English, we are drawing to a close on our traditional Ghost story (A Christmas carol). In Science, we investigated water resistance.
The children had their swimming assessment too which produced really positive outcomes. It has been a short swim this academic year due to the remodelling of the pool so I am really pleased to see so many children being able to swim 25m already!
Finally, the children have been learning about Rights and Responsibilities in our REACH activity today, part of Catholic Social Teaching. The children have made a list of their top 5 most important Human Rights, and have discussed what they are responsible for.
Next week we have LOTS going on! Please check your emails for the consent form for the Busy Brain Break interview/filming and do let us know if you can come to the carol concert on the 17th. Finally, children need shorts and t-shirts as well as their swimming costume on Tuesday as it is life saving skill session.
Nearly Christmas holidays ;)
See you next week!
Week beginning 25th November
Year 5 blog
In Maths, we have been learning about dividing by 10, 100 and 1000. This has included decimals which means the old misconception of "just add a zero" doesn't work! We have to move all the digits 1, 2 or 3 places to the right, put in the decimal point AND place value holders if needed.
On Thursday, we had our Advent retreat. We went round 5 stations around the school, doing different activities which tie in with the story of Jesus' birth. It was a very calm and quiet afternoon. It gave us an opportunity to go a bit deeper into the story of Jesus' birth and there were plenty of opportunities for quiet reflection. We were also joined by visitors from one of our MAT schools too!
In English, we spent two days writing cinquain poems. Cinq is French for 5 and these poems were only 5 lines long! We wrote about Vikings, long boats, treasure, a sword, a Viking hall and jewellery. We had to uplevel our vocabulary using a thesaurus too.
In Science, we were testing our own parachutes. We were learning about fair testing; so some of us changed the material, some changed the size of the parachute and some of us changed the length of string. We dropped them down the stairs to see how air resistance worked. We found larger, lighter parachutes fell slower.
We have another busy week ahead, so see you next week!
Mrs Carr note:
In the children's REACH activity, the children have been researching and planning for the Rotary club shoe box appeal. The children took a great deal of care with this and wrote lovely letters to their parents about what they needed. Considering the size of the class, we have managed to fill 12 boxes with 6-7 items each! That is absolutely incredible and I just wanted to say a huge thank you to the parents and children for your amazing generosity. The difference it will make is huge so thank you so much for supporting this scheme.
Week beginning 18th November
Year 5 blog
This week in History, we were looking at if History has really described the Vikings fairly- were they really good or bad? The Vikings were bad at first because they raided the Monks (because they were rich...but why didn't they share with the Vikings?); but then they stayed in Britain, converted to Christianity and eventually even ruled a bit. We decided that made them ok!
In DT we have continued with our prototype structures by now moving onto the planning stage. We had to consider the purpose of the structure, the materials we are going to use, triangulation and how to join it all together. We are going to be making our structures in the last week of term- exciting!
In Gymnastics, we have learnt some new skills! We have learned how to do forward rolls and shoulder stands. Hebe has taken more photos this week- they are AMAZING!
In Maths, we have build on our learning from last week and have moved onto multiplying decimals by 10 and 100. We have really excelled at this! We are so confident!
Finally, in RE we have been looking at John the Baptist. We compared his description from the Scriptures and analysed what kind of person he was. We also reflected on the world the Prophets were trying to encourage and how we could bring this to our lives. We showed the virtue of faith really strongly this week; including by going to Mass on the Feast day of our Blessed Lady and dropping off the bookmarks we made to make a positive contribution to our Parish.
But MOST importantly, this week we went SWIMMING! We were super confident in the water and showed our High expectations whilst out and about. We can't wait to go again next week!
See you next week!
Week beginning 11th November
Year 5 blog- PE photos by Hebe
In Literacy we have been looking at Myths, Legends and Sagas. This ties in brilliantly with our history topic of the Vikings! In Literacy lessons we have been looking at Beowulf, the legend of Odin and for our big write, we wrote the Saga of Bijorn. We all enjoyed writing this Saga because Bijorn was once a mighty warrior who wanted to die in a great battle to go to Vallhal. He kept trying to be in a big battle but the warriors he was fighting were "as strong as tinfoil" (simile by Tom!)
This week was a very important week too! It was anti bullying week! We turned into super secret spies and spent the week on the look out for children choosing respect. We have just finished our bar charts and we have seen a huge increase in children choosing respect around our school. Well done everyone!
We have heard from our partner class this week too. They sent us comments about our art work that we sent them before half term. Mrs Carr and the partner teacher are coming up with a Christmas plan too!
In Science, we investigated the difference between weight (N) and mass (g) of items around the room. Did you know that weight is measured in newtons and is how much gravity is pulling the objects to the centre of the earth? It is a mis-used word!!
Normal week for us next week, we can't wait to tell you about it!
Week beginning 4th November 2024
Year 5 Blog
This week we have done our first lesson of DT in Year 5. We really enjoyed learning about semi-permanent structures and we are going to be designing and making our own prototype. We did a mood board about semi-permanent structures with pictures and notes about existing structures; including what we liked and didn't like about the structures.
In RE we have started the new branch called Prophecy and Promise. We have started looking at the prophet Elijah and the story of him and the Vineyard. We learned the meaning of the story and that it is important to stand up for what is right- just like Elijah did.
We have also started Gymnastics with Mrs Dixon! We finally got to use the big blue frame in the hall, and we have been using the new boxes for climbing and jumping too. We learned five shapes; straddle, star, pike, tuck and straight. We loved using the new equipment and learned how to put it up safely.
We have also started our new history topic about the Vikings. We learned about how the Vikings made their boats and wrote a short paragraph about them. We pretended we were Anglo-Saxons who had captured a Viking boat builder called Sven (Mrs Carr). We interrogated our prisoner (poor Mrs Carr!!) to get information about the boats. Some facts we learned; their boats were mainly made of oak; they were 35 metres long and 3 metres wide; it took 6 months to build the boats and they travelled about 200 miles a day if the conditions were right.
In Maths, we have been doing column addition and subtraction- something we find very easy which is good! But Mrs Carr is going to mix it up today by introducing decimals...woohoo! We are feeling very confident!
We have got a busy week next week, but we are not starting swimming yet...one more week to wait!
Mrs Carr addition:
The photos I have added are from the Stroud Literacy festival which we participated in Online yesterday (Thursday). We watched a session by a former Olympic fencer who has written a book about gymnastics. The children absolutely loved it!