Welcome to Year 5's Term 5!

The first of our summer terms has arrived and with it comes lots of fun-filled activities each week as we continue with our learning. We will be completing our Inquiry into the Medieval Times and have the opportunity to explore our own line of Inquiry too. Following this, we shall begin to look at African Music as our next topic.

Our focus in Literacy this term is on biographies and we will be studying Shakespeare; finding out about his life and reading parts of his more famous plays to help us write a biography about him.  We will then move on to having a go at dramatising and acting out some of the parts of his renowned works. We will also be working on our targets which for a lot of us is 'tense', and there will be optional tense homework each Friday for us to take if we want to.

In Numeracy we are focussing on Number, particularly the trickier aspects such as fractions, decimals, percentages, negative numbers and word problems. To help us, Miss Formby is offering additional homework each week which is a chance to practise the skills we have learnt, but it is optional, so we don't have to do it if we feel confident enough :-)

In Science we are learning about the gases all around us, and finding out which gases we need, what some gases do and which gases are poisonous!  In RE we are continuing to learn about 'Journeys', and special journeys people make from different religions and why.

We are continuing with French this term and are back to two PE sessions a week now that we have finished swimming. Our focus is dance and racket skills which include tennis and badminton. In ICT we are learning more sophisticated skills in PowerPoint before moving on to modelling.

Each week, we will update our learning blog to keep you informed of our weekly ongoings!

Dover Class.

PS     The pictures above are from the Balloon Car Powered Challenge and Fencing!

Dover's Blog

Week 5

This week in Dover Class we have had some interesting lessons such as fencing instead of indoor PE and medieval wee testing in Inquiry! In Literacy, we have been looking at the topic biographies, and are hoping to write some spectacular biographies on William Shakespeare. In Numeracy, we have been reviewing fractions and learning new things such as percentages, ratio and proportion. In Science, we have just finished the project on the water cycle. Lots of us have been challenging ourselves by doing higher sheets and are getting much better at believing in ourselves.

By Abbie and Isobel

Week 4

Wow! What a week we have had! We have done all sorts of exciting activities this week such as;

Literacy

We modernised a scene from MacBeth and then performed our new script to the rest of the class as part of our S Factor (Shakespeare). Methinks it was rather jolly! It was rather tricky work (actually normally done by Year 8!) but we managed it really well by being resilient. Miss Formby is very proud, and thinks we have some actors and actresses in the making! We have also began to plan a story using pictures as inspiration.

Numeracy

Miss Britton and Miss Thomson have been teaching us some maths this week including 2D, 3D shapes, triangles and drawing and interpreting line graphs using data. We have been working really hard in preparation for our SATS in a weeks’ time.

Science

What? I can’t see it? Where is it? What are we learning about? Oh, what’s that smell? Gas! We have learnt all about different gases this week including Nitrogen, Helium, Oxygen , Carbon Dioxide and many more.  Did you know that Nitrogen makes up most of the air that is all around us, 78%?

Music

Miss Thomson has just taught us lots of African songs which we performed in harmony and acapella. We learnt how to sing with expression ( Miss Thomson made us sing with our tongues out!) and layer sound by clapping different patterns.

PE

In PE we have learnt how to use freeze frames in our performance using martial arts as our inspiration. We began the lesson watching Alluminations, from BGT to help us understand freeze frames.

Some of us this week also performed in the Choir and Performance show of The Emperor and the Nightingale, which hopefully some of you saw as well. We have worked really hard and it was a great success!

Finally, some of us have also had the opportunity this week to work with Mr Leando and eat toasted marshmallows in the fire hut. Don’t worry though, it will be your turn soon!

See you next week!

Week 6

Phew! What a hard week we have had. We have completed all of our Literacy SATs and next week, we have Numeracy. They are definitely not our favourite activity. We have now started to look at another of Shakespeare’s plays: A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

In Numeracy we have been learning about using 180º protractors, some people have even been using 360º protractors. We have also been learning about shape, reflections and translations; we have been working incredibly hard! Also in Numeracy, we have learnt about the different types of angles – acute, obtuse and even reflex angles.

During our Science lessons this week, we have been doing all kinds of experiments (lava lamps, dancing raisins, milk dye and mento’s and coke). These activities developed our predictive and observation skills.

We have had the pleasure of Miss Britton and Miss Thomson in our class for the last three weeks and we will be very sad to let them go.

We have also been doing martial arts dances in P.E. and practised our tennis skills – Wimbledon, here we come. Watch out Andy Murray!!

During our musical inquiry, we have been learning how to improvise African rhythms and playing them to each other. We have also learnt lots of new vocabulary such as polyrhythmic textures and improvisation.

See you next week J

Dover.