Highlights from Year 5

To start this half-term off we had an amazing trip to Ufton Court where we spend three days exploring the grounds and participating in a range of activities to work on different collaborative skills. Everyone worked well together, and most children overcame something that they found challenging and grew in confidence and leadership qualities. Looking forward to the next visits to Ufton Court.

In English, we studied a range of different genres including: autobiographies, adventure narrative and a science report lined to an investigation. The children developed their understanding for grammar and sentence work as well as increasing their vocabulary through using a thesaurus. The end pieces of writing have wowed me and the hard work the children have put into their writing and some even progressed onto pen! Looking forward to getting more onto pen next year. Let’s go for it year 5!

Role play was used in reading to understand the different characters points of view and how to use inference to answer questions. The children have enjoyed the book Wonder and hoping to show the film before the end of term. This threw up some important questions about stereotypes and people’s opinions about others. Some great discussions were had.

In Maths, we focused on written strategies for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, using these with larger numbers up to one million and understanding the need for careful presentation when using the column method and especially when it came to exchanging in subtraction. Also, we used estimating and rounding to help us gauge whether our end answer for within the range it should be. We have continued to build upon our explaining of mathematical processes and using the correct vocabulary for answering some rather tricky problems! I have been really impressed with the weekly times tables tests, where the scores for everybody have been increasing week on week. Well done Year 5.

In the other subjects, a huge range of activities has been carried out which the children have thoroughly enjoyed and gained an insight into the other subjects. In History, we myth busted the fact that Vikings had horns on their helmets! Plus, also that many of them were farmers and not savage warriors. With Science and the topic of Animals including Humans, we created life cycles of a range of animals and insects. Looked at creating a graph about animals' gestation periods, which really amazed the children as to how long some animals were pregnant for! Spanish was all about pets! All the children enjoyed singing along to the “Pet Song” and are able to name some well-known pets in Spanish.

I have thoroughly enjoyed watching the children in Year 5 develop over this half term and begin to find their own personalities, learning styles, continued enjoyment and a great learning attitude to all subjects.

Thank you, Year 5 and all the support, from the parents. Have a lovely Christmas