Year 5 Team: Mr J McCabe (Class Teacher) : Blog items
Date: 17th Mar 2022 @ 7:47pm
Another brilliant school week is in the bag as this half term continues to tick on by!
We enjoyed marking British Science Week with an experiment linked to this year’s theme of ‘growth’. This involved the children growing their own rainbow! To achieve this, we decorated the edges of pieces of kitchen roll before submerging each end in a bowl of water and allowing the scientific process of capillary action to occur. To spice up the investigation, the children were given a cheap, mid-range and expensive kitchen roll product in order to make predictions and investigate which kitchen roll product created the best rainbow effect and why. We learned how water is absorbed through the kitchen roll because when the first water molecule adheres to it and begins to move upward, it pulls the next water molecule up with it, like a chain. Alongside that, we enjoyed a colourful experiment and had lots of fun!
In Maths this week, we practised the method for finding fractions of amounts before progressing onto multiplying fractions. We will continue our focus on multiplying fractions next week too.
In our English work, we have completed our journey through the excellent picturebook, ‘The Darkest Dark’. Using our learning about the book's main character, Chris, we began to research further information about what he went on to achieve in later life. We learned how Chris embarked on three missions to space, including being the first Canadian to walk in space as well as serving as the Canadian commander of the International Space Station. With a wealth of facts and information at our disposal, we planned out a biography about the life of Chris Hadfield and are very much looking forward to completing our top copies within our author books next week.
In RE, we completed our mapping out of the main events of Holy Week where the children showed their adeptness at summarising each event and matching it to the appropriate picture. It is fair to say that our black thinking hats were used expertly and our knowledge of the many events during Holy Week is vast.
What a fantastic way to end the week with our class Comic Relief celebrations. Alongside a class quiz, we also took part in a Rock, Paper, Scissors Hoop Relay followed by an outside Dodgeball tournament in the sun for our PE lesson. Such enjoyment, resilience and friendly competitiveness was displayed throughout.
All that is left now is to wish you all a brilliant weekend. Hopefully the sun continues to shine and see you on Monday!
Reminders:
-Year 5 Parent-Teacher Meetings take place on Monday 21st (Y5 classroom) and Wednesday 23rd March (school hall).
Date: 10th Mar 2022 @ 9:27pm
Another exciting week in the Year 5 classroom and even more so with National Careers Week and International Women’s Day being a part of it too!
For International Women’s Day (and launching our National Careers Week), we completed a gender-based activity that set out to prove that there is no such thing as a girl’s occupation or a boy’s occupation. The children were first tasked with drawing a picture of their first impression when they heard different job roles. Such occupations included: doctor, footballer, policeworker and hairdresser. We then discussed the main gender choices made and how the pictures that we completed may have looked very different if the same activity was completed in a previous generation. The discussions we had were brilliant for unpicking gender stereotypes and promoting equality. All of our discussions and learning was then cemented by watching the powerful ‘Like A Girl’ advert from Always as well as Nike’s ‘What are girls made of?’ advert which further inspired us to research some powerful female role models of our own.
Our National Careers Week focus continued with two amazing and motivating career talks from both a neurosurgeon and a psychologist. We are greatly appreciative to both Mrs Harris and Mr Guyers for sharing their career journeys with us and for helping to inspire a new generation of potential future workers in your chosen fields.
In RE, we continued to explore the events of Holy Week whilst linking this to Christianity’s view of Easter as both a victory and a sacrifice. The children ordered the main events of Holy Week and summarised each within their RE books by linking each point to its picture representation.
For Maths, we have worked with both resilience and effort as we tackled some assessments to check our understanding of our learning so far this school year. Not only that, we also managed to fit in ‘The Pirate Game’ as well as a percentage scavenger hunt on our school field.
In our English work, we continued to progress in our reading of the excellent picturebook, ‘The Darkest Dark’. We explored the development of Chris’ character from the beginning of the story to now and, next week, we will move onto preparation for our first piece of author book work of this half term. Bring it on!
Last but not least (and we do advise you to approach with caution when entering into this) but please do ask your child their stance on our question of this week: ‘Are there more doors or wheels in the world?’ This class debate started up a frenzy within Year 5 with so many opinions willingly and enthusiastically shared en masse. We fully see why this particular question went viral across the Internet throughout this week and it certainly prompted such excellent thinking within our class.
Time does always seem to fly in Year 5. Wishing you all an enjoyable weekend and see you on Monday!