Year 5

Welcome to Year 5 

How lovely it is to have my old Year 3 class back! They have clearly learnt a lot in year 4 and have grown in confidence, maturity and height! I can't believe that we are already approaching the first half term holiday- it's crept us on us very quickly! That said, the children have made a fantastic start to the year so far and are making lots of progress already. I look forward to sharing all their work and achievements with you so far at the upcoming Parents' evening. 

English

The children have loved reading Varjak Paw by S.F. Said and have produced some excellent writing based on the book. Excitingly, I have been in touch with the author who I have arranged to come and visit Year 5 in February (I shall send out a letter about this nearer the time). The children will have an opportunity to ask any questions they have as well as hear what inspired SF Said to become a writer. I have told the children that he would love to take a look at their wonderful writing, which, needless to say, is suddenly encouraging them to put that little bit more effort into their work!

We have been learning how to create suspense in our writing, just like SF Said does in Varjak Paw. We have also looked at other authors who are great at building tension in their stories and we noted down how the they do this effectively. We have learnt that to create suspense, you need to:

• use short sentences to speed the action up
• make it silent/ quiet and describe a sudden sound
• make the threat move closer to the main character
• stormy weather/ make it dark 
• ask a question to make the reader imagine the threat
• use deadly similes and metaphors

Take a look at how we have applied this suspense toolkit to our own writing below:

'Write Whatever Wednesday'

In order to give the children an opportunity to write for pleasure, each week they are given time to write about a topic of their choice. The children are free to choose the style of writing, whether it be poetry, diary entries, fact sheets, postcards, letters or a story. It is great to see how much enjoyment the children get from these sessions- finding pleasure in writing! I will regularly upload their work below so keep an eye out!

Maths

Over the past few weeks, we have focused on developing our number and place value knowledge. We have been able to identify the place value of each digit in 5 and 6 digit numbers and have learnt to read numbers up to 1 million. We have also proven to be rounding whizzes- rounding numbers with up to 6 digits to the nearest 10, 100, 1000, 10,000 and 100,000! This was very tricky at first, and still is a little confusing at times, but the children have made fantastic progress and have developed a very secure understanding. Take a look at some of our place value work below:

Science (Mr Chapman)

Art

Geography

We have been practising our map skills this half term. So far, we have learnt to use an index to quickly find places in an atlas, identified what different symbols mean on ordnance survey maps, used the 8 different compass points to describe routes on a map, and we have used four or six-figure grid references to locate places on a map. 

History

After half term, we will be learning all about the Ancient Egyptians. I am currently trying to organise a trip to Haslemere Educational Museum so children can explore Egyptian artefacts as well as participate in lots of other interactive activities, such as mummification.

I am also in the process of organising a trip to the G Live theatre for the Horrible Histories show 'The Awful Egyptians'. I hope to have this all confirmed soon and a letter will be sent out to you with all the details. 

French