Week 7

What a fun week we have had this week! Miss Pritchard accompanied Year 6 to Lea Green Monday-Wednesday so we got to spend three days being taught by Mr Tague. We learnt all about the features of newspaper reports and used these to write our own articles about the discovery of Anglo-Saxon treasures at Sutton Hoo. We have been working hard to draft and edit these and are really proud of them. We also enjoyed our final netball session with Rosie and tennis with Mr Tague.

Once Miss Pritchard returned, we were interested to hear all about her adventures at Lea Green and cannot wait until we get the chance to go next year. We grilled her about all the activities and the food. We also continued with our newspaper articles and Anglo-Saxon/Viking life double page spreads and our maths unit on addition and subtraction.

We are really pleased with how we have settled into Year 5 life this half term and are looking forward to a good relaxing break. See you all next half term!

Week 6

In PE this week, Rosie talked to us about defending principles and how these are the opposite of attacking principles: to prevent the other team from scoring, to stop them getting possession and to close down their space. We continued to play games of netball with positions and are much better at using the depth and width of the court than we were at the start of the unit.

We have finished our independent Magic Box poems and are very proud of them! We have now begun to research different aspects of Anglo-Saxon and Viking life so that we can create our own double page spreads.

In maths, we have started a new short unit on addition and subtraction. We have been building on our knowledge of column addition and column subtraction by calculating with larger numbers and ensuring that we line our numbers up correctly and start in the right place.

We have also enjoyed celebrating 'Black History Month'. We learnt about the life of Katherine Johnson (ahead of our next topic about space) and have been watching a clip about the life of Rosa Parks. We were shocked and upset by the racist attitudes of so many in the past and discussed how this can still be the case today. We are proud that we are a class that is so understanding of all different types of people and hope that we can challenge racial and stereotypical prejudice throughout our lives!

Week 5

Another super busy week in Year 5 this week, with lots of lovely hard work going on. We finished sentence stacking our class model poem and have been busy planning and writing our own poems based on our own chosen theme. We have been doing lots of discussions about the importance of editing and have been having a go at improving our own writing.

In maths, we finished our unit on place value with lessons on how to round numbers to the nearest 10, 100, 1000, 10,000 and 100,000.

In history, we enjoyed learning about the famous Anglo-Saxon king called Alfred the Great. We learnt how to make notes to help us with our independent writing and then pretended to be curators from an Anglo-Saxon museum and wrote our own plaques to go on an Alfred the Great statue. We enjoyed listening to an Alfred the Great song too (see below).

PE has been great fun this week too. In tennis with Miss Pritchard, we learnt about how to throw accurately with our non-dominant hand so that we can begin to learn how to serve at the start of a game. We had a go at trying to serve bean bags over the net with our racket hands into a hoop on the other side- this was much harder than it looked!! With Rosie, we continued to think about the principles of attacking in an invasion game and then had a go at playing real games with real positions! We are beginning to learn where to stand and where we are allowed on a court! Lots of us have also started to go to Rosie and Miss Pritchard's after school netball club on a Monday night.

Week 4

Lots of hard work has been happening in the Year 5 classroom this week. We have been continuing our place value topic in maths by learning how to write numbers to one million in words and digits. We have been learning to count in powers of 10 and how to find 10, 100 and 1000 more and less in different contexts (like using place value charts and Gattegno charts). We finished the week learning to place larger numbers on a number line and have worked hard to improve our presentation standards. ✏️ 

Our whole class Magic Box poem is nearly completed. We have spent a lot of time discussing the vocabulary that would be the most effective and trying to make our sentences as effective as possible. Miss Pritchard has been really pleased that we have adopted Kit Wright’s structure to write and punctuate our own verses. Next week, we are looking forward to creating our independent poems, with a creative twist. Come back next week to see how we get on! 📦 
 

We really enjoyed the latest instalment of our invasion games unit with Rosie where we thought about the key principles of attacking and defending. We practised our chest pass skills and had a go at a passing drill as a four. This was really quite tricky (especially an overhead pass) and something we need more work on. Rosie then taught us a fun game to understand the basic principles of netball. She talked to us about the importance of using the depth of the court to make the defenders work harder. Miss Pritchard picked this up later in the week. We worked on improving our chest pass technique and ensuring that the ball travelled to our partner’s chest and not their face! Then, we worked on the overhead passes that caused us trouble on Monday and how this will become useful when learning to shoot into the net. We also had another go at Rosie’s game (we’d have happily played this all afternoon if we could) and Ava earned the first house point of the year for her great use of width and space. 🏀 
 

In history, we looked at where the Anglo-Saxons and Vikings chose to settle when they invaded Britain. We were amazed at how many similarities there were between the two tribes. We thought about how these settlements differed from the previous ones created by the Romans and how they are vastly different to modern day British homes. We aren’t too sure we’d like to live in a house made by wattle and daub (the manure wouldn’t be very appealing) but some of us were quite interested in being an Anglo-Saxon child as it would be our job to stand on lookout for wolves! 🐺 

The best part of the week might possibly be, though, our class story sessions. We are absolutely loving ‘Escape Room’ and often finish a chapter with our mouths hanging open before begging for one more chapter. We really don’t want the book to end. Throughout the story, there have been so many twists and turns and we’ve been coming up with some amazing theories as to what might be going on. At the moment, we are questioning why dust seems to feature so heavily in each section of the game. The

ree of the five children have sadly met their fate, we can’t wait to see if Ami manages to survive. We aren’t too sure how we are going to top this book!! 📚

Week 3

This week has been a shorter week as we were at home on Monday to watch the Queen's funeral. We have been continuing our discussions this week about her life and using this to develop our VIPERS skills in reading. We have been particularly interested in the life and abdication of Edward VIII and have been asking Miss Pritchard lots of questions of our own, including 'What was Edward called after he had abdicated?' (He was given a new title- The Duke of Windsor)

We have also been continuing with our Magic Box poems and have impressed with our use of language; lingering, intoxicating aroma and uplifting essence have been some of our favourites.

In maths, we have been continuing to understand the place value of numbers to one million. We solved a problem where we had five number cards and had to rearrange them to make as many five-digit numbers as we could. We worked systematically to ensure that we had got all the possibilities.

In history, we have been learning about who the Vikings were and where they came from. We also learnt about the reasons why they came to Britain and briefly discussed their battles with the Anglo-Saxons and their raiding of the monasteries (especially at Lindisfarne). We will learn about this is more detail in a few weeks. We learnt about what a Viking longship was like and had a go at sketching our own. We also practised shading effectively- this is harder than it looks! When we went outside, a couple of us found some examples of shading in nature. 

Week 2

Another super and busy week again this week. We have made a great start to our new reading, writing and maths units. In reading, we have been learning about the life of Queen Elizabeth II following her death last week. We have been focusing on the vocabulary viper and using a dictionary to find the definitions are unknown, ambitious words, such as: abdication, affable, unwavering and devotion. Next week, we will use this text to improve our skills of retrieval, summarising and giving explanations.

In writing, we have been learning and performing the poem 'The Magic Box' by Kit Wright and then had an experience day to collect positive smells, sounds, colours, etc to help us to write our own versions during our sentence stacking sessions.

We have been exploring Roman numerals and the place value of numbers in maths, building on what we have learnt in previous years. We have had a lot of focus on how numbers can be represented in different ways.

In history, we have learnt about who the Anglo-Saxons were and where they came from, and created our own Anglo-Saxon character. We then learnt about the seven kingdoms and how their language has left a legacy on the names of places in Great Britain. We had fun exploring Google maps to find places where it is believed that the Anglo-Saxons settled and what the name tells us about that settlement, for example, Willington, Repton, Egginton, Hilton and Hatton may have been settlements that were farms or villages.

We have finished our self-portraits that are on display in the hall and are creating a display in  our classroom that shows everyone what it is that we want to achieve this year. 

Well done to the children for winning their second 'POPCORN PARTY' letter. This week's table competition was a close run contest, but congratulations to the Tic Tac table who edged their way to success. Otto Otter is looking forward to spending the week with you.

Week 1

What a super and busy first week we have had!

The children came in full of excitement and tales of their summer holidays, and it was great to see so many familiar faces again. The children have settled into their new classroom well and have remembered lots of our school rules. We have also created a list of important (and positive) rules to follow to help to make the classroom a happy place to be. The children have made a great start with this and have managed to gain their first 'POPCORN PARTY' letter already- it's no wonder that we were all 'Good to be Green'! 

Well done, in particular, to the Percy Pigs table who managed to collect the most points in our table points competition. Otto the Otter is looking forward to spending the week with you!

This week, we have been busy learning all about each other and playing some 'getting to know you' games. We have been learning about how to draw self-portraits in proportion ready to go on the whole school hall display. As part of our art curriculum, we watched a video called 'Austin's butterfly' where we learnt about how Austin's friends critiqued his work so that he could redraft and improve; we felt that this sent us a very powerful message about helping each other to improve and not being afraid to make mistakes.

We discovered that our new topic is a history topic called 'Invade, Raid and Stayed!' that focuses on the Anglo-Saxons and Vikings. We collected a bank of different facts that we thought we might already know and wrote our own questions. We are looking forward to starting to answer some of these next week.

Finally, we ended the week with the incredibly sad news of the death of Queen Elizabeth II. We had a very in-depth discussion about her role and life, grief and the Royal Family. We will be continuing to explore this further next week through our reading and writing sessions. Those who wanted some time to reflect, enjoyed creating their own stamps in tribute.