Year 5 have had two fun weeks back.

In music we have begun learning to play the ukuleles. We have learnt hold to hold and strum them correctly and have identified the note of each string. Next lesson we will be learning to play chords.

In Literacy we have been looking at screen use and how much is appropriate for children. We had a special video from Mr Mark Lewis and Mrs Elson who explained their views on both the positives and negatives of the subject. We have also been fortunate to have coaches from Sharks Rugby who have been teaching us tag rugby skills.  To celebrate Earth Day, we had a live lesson about how to treat our earth right and the different ways that we could help it. We also went and looked at the different nature areas around our school. For science this half term we have started to learn about the different parts of a flower. We took some photos of different flowers and drew the male and female parts.

In Y5 we have had a lot of visitors this week: we had students from Hertfordshire University come in and teach us a song that they had written for us, we had SSFT (Stevenage Sporting Futures Team) to deliver a workshop on How to Love your Heart. They taught us what to do in an emergency (DR.ABCD) - Danger, Response, Airways, Breathing, Compressions/CPR, Defibrillator. We used dummies to practise on and were shown how to get our partners into the recovery position.

In Literacy we have been writing a narrative based on a video titled One Small Step. As part of an experience day, we made origami rockets, which was really tricky to do! It helped us to understand what Luna felt like when she was experiencing failure in the story. Also this week we celebrated World Book Day where we dressed up as our favourite book characters, read with the Reception children, had a World Book Day themed quiz and made a creative origami bookmark.

The last few weeks, we have been using a program in music that allows us to create a Grime track. We have been creating our own drum beat and bass line to make our own track. In art, we have been researching information about an artist called Chila Kumari Singh Burman. In particular, we used her work to inspire us to be creative with our own portraits using oil pastels. In Science, we have been looking at dissolving salt/sugar in water and trying to separate contaminated water which had mud, leaves, twigs and glitter to see if we could use filters to remove different parts of the mixture. During literacy, we have started our new writing unit based on the text Varmints. We generated our own vocabulary for the paradise at the start of the book.

In Year 5 we have been entering the Christmas spirit. This week we walked to St Peter's Church for our Christmas Celebration and sung a new song called Love Shone Down. We listened to Reverend Kate retell the Christmas story. On Thursday, the whole of Key Stage 2 visited the Gordon Craig theatre to watch Dick Whittington for this year's pantomime. In class we have been planning to write our own diary entry based on a BBC documentary about emperor penguins. We are writing from the point of view of one of the camera crew. In French we have been learning how to say what different pets we have. In art we have designed a monument all about ourselves. We have thought about clues to our likes and combined them into one design. Lastly, in science, we have been thinking about alternative uses for everyday objects: paper cups, ruler, books. We have then considered how we would advertise our items with their different uses.

This week has been a busy week for Y5. We started the new half-term with an author visit from Martin Impey. We learnt that Martin Impey has illustrated nearly 60 books. One of his most famous books is called The Blitz: One Family’s War, which has won several awards. In Literacy, we have been learning about the book the Explorer by Katherine Rundell so for our first day we all went outside to gather leaves and draw things outside then we had to describe them using our senses. We also made a raft out of sticks that we found outside. During guided reading this week, we created a remembrance poem titled ‘I Can Bring Peace by…’ We then typed up our poem and repeated the poem to fill our page. Finally, we used corks to create a poppy print over the top. In PE, Mr K taught us how to play archery. We first started off in teams, and we had to try to hit the board or the bullseye. Then we went against Mr K. He obviously won, but we did have a few people get higher than him.

In Year 5, we have been working hard on learning some new calculations during five a day for our morning work. Our teacher then writes the questions on the board that we might get stuck on to go through together. In literacy, we are focusing on Kick {our summer reading homework book }and learning about child labour. FACT: in some countries, children of 5yrs of age have to work! In maths, we are learning about place value and using grids to identify which digits are larger and smaller.

We started the year focusing on the book Katie and the Waterlily Pond by James Mayhew. In art, we have been drawing and painting waterlilies inspired by the book. In PE we have been running and training for the cross-country competition coming up for Year 5 and 6. In DT we have begun learning about bridges: Arch bridges, Beam bridges and Truss bridges. We even started to make our own Truss bridge out of spaghetti.