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Year 5 have been familiarising themselves with our new class text - The Lost Thing. The book might be a metaphor for a dystopian society or it might just be a story about a big, red teapot thing!
The Year 5 teachers have been really impressed by the energy, enthusiasm and focus shown by the children on their return to school after the summer holidays.
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The penultimate week of Year 5 has been another very busy and productive one. In addition to our sports morning, the children have completed their learning all about human lifecycles in science. We were fascinated to find out how women's football has changed in the twentieth century and we interviewed our own primary source, Mr Lancaster, to find out more about changes in the women's game. The children have really enjoyed finding out through their parents and grandparents or family how cinema has changed in the 20th Century and they used the chromebooks to create information about the next 'big thing' to entice audiences back to the cinema.
This week, the children in Year 5 have been answering the question: 'Qu'est-ce que tu manges pour le déjeuner?'. We spent sometime getting familiar with the French words for certain lunchbox items and even made and played our own memory game. It has been difficult to remember whether each food item is masculine or feminine, but we have been impressed with the children's efforts to widen their French vocabulary. Perhaps you can ask your child if they would like 'une pomme' or 'du fromage' when you are next preparing a meal together.
This term, we have been learning about human development and this week in particular we focused on the milestones a person reaches as they grow from a baby to a 10-year-old. There was lots of excellent discussion, especially from the children who still have babies or toddles in their households. We also reminisced about our favourite nursery rhymes and the children in 5H taught Mrs Snedden all about Little Rabbit Foo Foo! The children added their new information to their ever growing timeline. You can imagine from the picture above just how long the timeline will be when complete it.
Another busy week in Year 5! This week we have been focusing on building up our coding skills. The children were able to identify correct vocabulary by explaining words such as 'algorithm', 'program', 'command' and 'debugging'. Following on from this, we looked at implementing our knowledge into our coding programme, code.org. We were challenged with a variety of tasks that aimed at directing a character towards an end goal which the children achieved by using commands to create algorithms. Additionally, they were tasked with debugging existing algorithms by identifying problems in the code and rectifying these. As you can see from the pictures above, we were really enjoying our learning on coding!
We have had a very busy week in Year 5 with a lot of learning in geography and science. We continued to learn about coastal erosion on Monday. The children recreated a beach using sand trays. They observed what happened to the sand when the waves approached from straight on and then from an angle (using the Isle of Wight as an example). The movement of the sand when the waves approach the beach at an angle is called Longshore Drift. The children then investigated what would happen by adding barriers along their "beaches" and looked how these "groynes " are used along beaches to slow coastal erosion. In science, the children have begun their learning about human lifecycles. We have been extremely impressed with the discussion this has generated and the way in which the children have used the science vocabulary to describe the beginning of the human lifecycle and the reproduction of humans.
The sun is shining, the children have returned full of energy and we have started our final half-term with a new art unit — watercolour! This week the children have had two art lessons, where we have focused on individual skills as we work up to painting a landscape. During the first lesson, the children worked with a lot of focus and concentration to create colours that have high and low saturation. We then looked at colour mixing in our second lesson as we will need to create a wide range of colours for our landscapes.
What a fantastic final week before Half Term! We continued our learning of life cycles in science as we learnt about the gestation period of mammals. The children were able to interpret data and use this to create a bar graph which we then analysed and subsequently discovered that an elephant has a gestation period of around 22 months! We also finished reading our class text, Journey to Jo'burg, which centres around 2 children as they navigate apartheid in South Africa. The children subsequently wrote a diary entry as the character, Tiro, which retold the events of one of the chapters.
This week has been another very productive week in Year 5. We have continued to learn about how coastal features are formed, in particular caves, stacks and arches. To enrich our learning we have used the Chromebooks and had a very exciting time learning to use stop start animation and play dough to create a short film showing how the geographical features are formed over time.
As our Global Trade geography topic has come to a close, we have started our new unit which focuses on map skills and the physical geography of our coasts. During our first lesson we learnt all about OS maps, what scale is, how to use a key and symbols and how to give a four or six figure grid reference! What a lot of new information. The children really enjoyed using the OS maps and were surprised to see how much bigger Richmond Park is compared to the common. They, of course, all enjoyed locating their houses and our school too.
We are enjoying learning all about reproduction in plants. After finding out about how flowers use sexual reproduction to make seeds and how these seeds are dispersed, this week we found out about asexual reproduction. We were amazed to learn that plants can produce offspring that are exact copies of the parent plant (clones) and were impressed to see this in action. Ask your child all about the advantages and disadvantages of both sexual and asexual reproduction.
