Class Story: - Our class story this half term is called 'The Nowhere Emporium' written by Ross MacKenzie.

Week 5

What an exciting week we have had to finish our half term!

The week started with a visit from author Matt Oldfield. Matt talked to us about what it's like to be an author and did a workshop with us about significant people. We had a go at writing a bio for someone that inspires us. This was great practice for the rest of the week as we have spent our English lessons planning our independent writes and writing our own biographies on a famous person.

On Monday afternoon, three members of our class (and Miss Pritchard) headed to Pennine Way Academy for South Derbyshire Active Schools Partnership's Year 5/6 netball tournament. The team topped their league: beating Pennine Way B 6-0 and Melbourne Juniors A 2-1 and drawing 0-0 with Springfield Juniors A. They then beat Weston on Trent 3-0 in the semi-finals before being defeated 2-0 in the final by Pennine Way A. Go Team WPS! We are very proud of you!

In maths, we have been completing our unit on Statistics. We have really enjoyed learning how to read, interpret and draw line graphs as well as to read and interpret tables, two-way tables and timetables.

In science with Mrs Lea, we enjoyed investigating water resistance by learning about what it means to be streamlined. We worked in groups to make different boats and tested with travelled the quickest though the water. It was great fun! We also learnt about different mechanisms (levers, pulleys and gears) and how they can have an impact on the force of objects. We enjoyed watching 'Wallace and Gromit's Cracking Contraptions' and invented our own interesting mechanisms.

On Thursday, South Derbyshire ASP came to deliver our Level 1 Bikeability session. We had great fun despite the rain! We learnt about how to check our bikes and make simple repairs, how to glide, how to control our bikes (including setting off, cruising, slowing down, braking and stopping- including riding one-handed!), how to pedal without feeling wobbly or out of control and to be aware of our surroundings by looking behind us and turning around obstacles.

Week 4

Wow! What a busy week we have! This week has been Assessment Week and we have been busy answering lots of quiz questions about reading, spelling and maths. Miss Pritchard is very proud of our concentration, determination and resilience.

In other areas, we have been thinking about our impact on the planet and how we can conserve resources to help in the fight against Climate Change. In our discussion about power stations, we ended up talking about the Chernobyl disaster and were intrigued about this. There's a Newsround video below with more details on. In PE with Rosie this week, we learnt how to do a relay race. Rosie taught us the sweep up and sweep down methods and we learnt how to use the opposite hands. By the end of the session, we had got much better at not dropping the baton!

Thank you to everyone who attended Parents' Evening this week- it was lovely to see you all and for the children to share their work with you.

Week 3

This week was British Science Week and we celebrated with lots of different science activities. We launched our week by reading a book called ‘Not all Scientists Wear Lab Coats’ and talked about what a scientist is and challenged the different stereotypes that we might associate with scientists. We thought of questions that we would like to ask a scientist and then Mrs Maynard answered these questions in an assembly as she worked as a scientist in a lab before she became a teacher. 

We have been reading about the life of Sir Isaac Newton and how he discovered gravity, we used Learning by Questions to answer questions based around the vocabulary and retrieval vipers. We had a great afternoon investigating air resistance by making different parachutes. We had a discussion about different variables and the difference between dependent and independent variables. The otters worked in groups and chose their own independent variable to change and then ensured we kept the others the same to have a fair test.

Later in the week, the otters had a STEM workshop with the RAF as organised by the Smallpeice Trust. This session supported our previous learning about gravity and air resistance and allowed us to improve our collaboration skills. We worked in small teams to make our own rockets which we could blow from a straw. We investigated the effect the angle of launch would have on the rocket’s trajectory. It was great fun!!

In other areas of the curriculum, we have been continuing to write our biography about David Attenborough and learnt about where power comes from and where different types of power stations are located across the UK. In PE, Rosie organised a carousel of athletics events and then challenged us to beat our teams’ original scores. We have been learning about percentages (and their equivalent fractions and decimals) in maths and played a really fun pairs game; see the link below for an interactive version. Mr Rodgers has also showed us a fun game to supplement our multiplication and division fact recall.

Week 2

In English, we have continued to improve our VIPERS reading skills through our work on 'Song of the Dolphin Boy'. We have also started a new writing unit- a biography on David Attenborough. We started the week by learning about the features of a biography and the shapes that will make up our model text (heading, background information, early life, mind blowing moment, early in the journey, fact splats, later in the journey, achievements, world recognition and memory box & quotes). We read through a biography on Jane Goodall and identified words in each paragraph that matched the shape. We then had a go at putting a cut up biography back together again, using the shapes and vocabulary to support us. Throughout the rest of the week, we started to sentence stack our own biography about David Attenborough and carried out some research about his life.

We really enjoyed learning about the life of Jane Goodall, and spent some additional time finding out a bit more about her life, and watched some interviews with her. We felt that this was particularly poignant as it was International Women's Day on Wednesday.

In maths, we started a new topic on decimals and percentages. We have been learning about what decimals are and how to represent, read and write numbers to 3 decimal places. We also learnt how to compare decimals.2

In science, we learnt about different types of forces. We will look at these in more detail during this half term, with lots of practical investigations so that we can practice how to work scientifically.

In geography, we learnt about settlements and what resources are needed for someone to set up a successful settlement. We discussed how these needs have evolved over time. We were given a range of needs and debated which of these we felt were the most important, down to the least important. This was quite contentious as times, and we learnt about the difference between things we want and things we need and what is vital for human survival. We then followed a design brief to design a settlement for a certain group of clients, e.g. a group of dairy farmers who are ski enthusiasts.

Our PE this half term is swimming and athletics. In athletics, we carried out a range of races, including a relay race.

Next week is British Science Week.

Here's a link to some fun investigations that are easy to carry out at home, and require few resources (or ones that are easy to find in the house).

Week 1

The children made a great start to the new half term. We have ben busy completing our fantasy story prologues and continuing with our class story, 'The Nowhere Emporium'. We started a new novel for our Whole Class Reading sessions called 'The Song of the Dolphin Boy'. This novel supports our new geography topic, 'Only We Can Save the World'.

In Maths, we have been learning how to multiply fractions by an integer and to find fractions of amounts.

Thursday was World Book Day. We enjoyed dressing up and talking about our favourite books. We watched the BBC Live Lesson with Katie and Kevin Tsang and Michael Rosen and played a matching game about different genres. We also enjoyed reading with our families at the book cafe on Friday morning, and had a go at redesigning characters with a twist and designing our own reading dens.

Our Mayan masks have now dried and we had great fun adding colour to them this week.