This week, we have been learning all about the magical planet of Mars. Using videos, articles and websites, children have gathered many facts and figures about this fascinating world outside of Earth (linking heavily with the Space learning in Science last half term).

Using this knowledge, the children are going to turn it into a speech from another planet. Firstly, we decided to read a speech from a film linked to Mars (The Martian). Mr Downie read it first. Unfortunately, it was so boring and monotone, we nearly fell asleep! Therefore, we needed to show how to read it with expression. Here’s some snapshots of us practising!

After learning about how we see the different phases of the moon from Earth, we used Oreo cookies to demonstrate our understanding. We scraped off various quanities of the icing on each biscuit to show each phase and labelled them. We learned that waxing means to grow and waning means to shrink. At the end of the lesson, we were even allowed to eat some fresh cookies!

We also shaded a diagram at the bottom of our sheet to show what half of the moon can be seen from space.

The children were treated to a wonderful performance from a ‘wind instrument quintet’ consisting of a wide range of musical instruments from classical backgrounds. Each adult shared insightful information about their chosen instrument and even showed the children some cool tricks in the process!

Hopefully, the children will be inspired to pick up an instrument in the future and learn how to play.

In Literacy, Year 5 have taken part in another experience day based on the book called The Explorer. For this session, the children had to get in role and pretend to be one of the characters from the book. In the story, the children are trying to find their way out of the Amazon rainforest and make a raft in order to navigate along the river to try to reach the city of Manaus. During the task, Year 5 had to imagine they had different roles and they worked together to create a raft. Here are some of the finished products!  

Year 5 Sycamore class have settled extremely well into school this week. They have adapted to the new ‘school way of life’ and are able to recall the safety tips we have introduced this week.

We have completed a fantastic piece of descriptive writing using the book ‘Window’ as a writing stimulus. They have incorporated fronted adverbials, descriptive vocabulary and interesting verbs.

Our maths learning has focused on times tables, finishing with a problem-solving activity using number cards. We found it quite a puzzle to use all of the cards to solve a number problem!

Year 5 have started a new unit in history this week about the Victorians. They received a letter from Mrs Jarman’s sister, who has recently moved, asking them to find out as much as they could about an old tin she found in the loft of her new house. The house is Victorian and therefore she felt that Year 5 would be able to help her. Within the tin, there were a number of artefacts which the children enjoyed exploring and deciding who they might belong too. They also made some predictions about what it would have been like to live in this period of time.