Welcome to the Year 5 Class Page!

On this page you will find your homework, weekly spellings and information and links to our learning which will be updated as and when we move through the year. You will also find photos and descriptions of the exciting things we have been getting up to. Have a look!

This term we are learning all about units of measure (area and volume and time), geometry (properties of shape - angles) and statistics! We will be reading and writing about 'Goodnight Mister Tom' in English and learning about our patron saint 'St Thomas More' and sacraments in RE. In Science, we will be completing our 'Second Look Science' unit, this means we will be using our investigative lens and completing a variety of experiments based on previous topics. In History we will be deepening our knowledge of the Tudors, Victorians and completing a study on our local area through the ages. In Geography we are exploring fair trade and what globalisation means and the affect it has on the world today. . We are expanding our Spanish Vocabulary with our topic 'Me in the World'.

We started the year by agreeing our class rules. We have all signed them to show that we will follow these in all that we do!

English today, we put our Script writing to the test. We read through, picked and acted out the different scenes that we have written. Our Scripts we based on the story of ‘Goodnight Mister Tom’ and it was great to see the children’s understanding of the characters really come through in their acting and script writing.

We have had an excellent time over the last 3 weeks designing and playing on our ‘Throlf’ course! It has been great to see everyone’s imagination be used across the three weeks.

In DT this term we have been looking at making healthy choices. After lots of research we made a healthy spaghetti bolognese sauce.

Today we were scientists exploring plants. We had to further understand how plants reproduce, looking at the male and female parts of the plant. To really understand this we have dissected daffodils, we then put each part of the daffodil in our books and labelled them.

Today we had the fantastic opportunity to play inflatable football we all took it in our stride and had the best time!

In DT this term we looked at making a 'Pop-up book'. We had to use 3 different types of mechanism to help our book pop up. We could use levers, folds or pop up pages. It was lovely to see the children's creativity throughout the books and their stories are fantastic. 

Our Chairs have gone on STRIKE! 

We came into class this morning to be told our chairs have gone on strike! They were not happy and had stacked themselves up in the corner of the room asking for better working conditions! 
Year 5 were sad to hear that the chairs have felt this way but have promised to change their ways. The chairs have returned but Year 5 need to work really hard to keep them. We will be writing to the Chair of Governors of the Chair Court to persuade them to keep our chairs in class! We hope that our persuasive letters will really do the trick. 
To help us truly understand what the chairs have gone through we had some representatives for the chairs in class and had the opportunity to ask them some questions.

In Science this term we have been exploring forces and how they are constantly acting around us. This week we focused on Friction being given a task to find the best material to use as a break pad on a tricycle. It was great fun to look at the effect that different materials had on the cars and why this happens. Ask us which material was the best and why! 

Today we had a great opportunity to take part in RAF Glider Challenge. It was very interesting to put our previous forces knowledge to the test to help understand how to make the best glider. 

The Glider Challenge:

The key steps we took:

1. Learn

2. Design

3. Build

4. Test

5. Compete

It was key for us to work in team and communicate well with each other.

We began by considering the difference between a glider and an areoplane. A glider doesn't have an engine.

We looked at the key components of a glider and the forces of flight. We also then considered the wing design.

Year 5 were lucky enough to have sessions of Rowing. This is a great opportunity which Year 5 have really taken in their stride. It is nice to see everyone being so enthusiastic about their new skill, they have learnt a lot about teamwork as well as setting goals for individual development. When the final session arrived we had shown some great progress in our form with all most every child exceeding their personal record. Everyone was so enthusiastic and showed great sportsmanship throughout the morning, it was brilliant to see. 

In Spanish this term we are exploring Spanish Cafes. We have learnt so far the names of some Spanish breakfast items as well as how to ask for these. Take a listen to one of our conversations. 

Year 5 would like to say a big thank you to Miss Hall for organising such a fun and exciting event! We learnt all about irreversible changes in our Christmas Science lab, it was very interesting to see the changes occur in the fudge mixture as we worked through the recipe. 

We went to 'The National Space Centre' it was a brilliant day and helped us with our Science topic 'Earth and Space'! We learnt so many new facts, including:

Astronauts were trained by a camera that was inside the toilet.

The first food eaten on the moon was bacon.

The rings of Saturn would sink, but the planet would float due to its density.

A dog got sent to space; however, it was a fruit fly that was the first animal in space!

You would need a powerful man to lift a can of beans on the sun due to the gravitational pull!

The liquid in space turns into bubbles.

In space, your muscles weaken as they aren't being used.

One month in space can cause 2% of the calcium in your bones to waste.

We went up the Rocket Tower, which has 144 steps!

Our best part was when we saw Chad, who we saw in our planetarium show; he was a test subject who taught us all about the dangers in space!

In Science today we used fruit to accurately represent the size of the planets. Although correct for size they do not represent the state of each planet as some planets are gas balls. It was very interesting to see the size of the plants in comparison to their distance away from the sun. Take a guess as to which fruit is which planet!

As part of our Remembrance Day Service we created our own poppies. Although the poppies were very difficult to make they look amazing. As a class we came up with a design to display our poppies in a meaningful way before adding some tags to the poppies with remembrance statements. The children were really thoughtful when creating their statement and add to the poignance of the piece. 

In Art we sketched and then printed images of houses. We picked parts of houses that we found interesting based on the image we sketched last week. We had lots of fun and the results were amazing.

Today we uncovered our new book of the month. The children and myself will have different opportunities to read this book with two books being placed in our book corner, which the children can take it in turns to read. 

We will be discussing this book alongside our previous book of the month Twitch by M.G. Leonard. 

The children were very excited to discuss the clues of the book and how these might link to the cover.

To celebrate The National Day of Spain, we learnt about the controversial festival San Fermin. We found out how the tradition started and found it interesting to understand how residents of Pamplona feel about the tradition. We spent the day embedding Spanish into everything that we do, taking the registers, saying hello and even saying our school prayers in Spanish. We finished the afternoon by combining our celebrations with celebrations for World Food Day, we tasted some Spanish food, the Spanish Omelette had mixed reviews but brought a nice end to our afternoon. 

In DT this term we have been exploring 'Doodlers', this has been a very challenging unit for us! We started by looking at the use of Doodlers before taking them apart to understand further how they work. We then had the opportunity to design and create our own Doodlers. This came with its own challenge and not every Doodler worked, however it was lovely to celebrate the ones that did as a class. 

Year 5 had a very important job this week! We were asked to help the local football team find the best conductors to help the electricity reach their floodlights. We set of investigating different materials to see which material had the least resistance and therefore created the brightest bulb. We found out that either copper wiring or tinfoil had the best results and passed this back to the local football team! We did find their suggestion of a table leg very silly! We presented our group findings back to the class, we found it very interesting to have different results across the groups!

In our Science topic 'Properties of Materials' we have been exploring whether materials are thermal conductors or thermal insulators. To help us investigate these properties of materials, we set up an experiment to see which material would insulate the ice from the outside temperature. With a few anomalies in our in experiment we decided that either cotton or cardboard would be the best material to make a lunch box out of. 

To create a fun writing stimulus we created a map and designed it to help us tell a story. We had lots of fun using the rice to help us create islands to base our maps on. We then wrote a story based on our map design, we had some really great ideas including Squirrel Island, Candy Land, Chinese Town, Dinosaur Island and Science Island that had a sudden increase in popularity.