The recent warm weather and sunshine have been a welcome addition to our weekly orienteering sessions, with the children focussing on successfully navigating the course, taking bearings and supporting each other as a team - as well as staying cool! Indoors, we have been preparing for the Y5 assembly later this week as well as continuing to explore human development in science and negative numbers in maths. 

Monday saw pupils meet their new Y6 teachers and experience their classrooms for next year. It's fair to say there is a great deal of excitement and perhaps a little trepidation about moving up to the top of the school! 

It has been lovely to see the children return to school after the half-term break, full of excitement about our imminent residential trip. There has been a decidedly Isle of Wight flavour to lessons this week! In maths, we have continued our work on decimals, which will prove very handy when considering how best to spend pocket money on the trip. We've also been busy orienteering, which will be useful in making sure that we get to all the right places at all the right times. In art, we've been finishing our landscape watercolours and finding out about the work of Turner, Cezanne and O'Keefe - which will help us to better appreciate the scenery from an artist's perspective, and finally, we've been making sure that everyone is up to speed with what to bring. Fingers crossed for some sunshine!

In gymnastics, we have been building routines in groups, combing and performing the different movements learnt and practised throughout the unit. Each performance demonstrated great creativity and panache - well done Y5!

Trees have been the order of the day in art, with children experimenting with different brush-strokes to create everything from statuesque pines to weeping willows. The outdoors theme has extended to our work in English, where we continue to enjoy poems within The Lost Words. Children have explored figurative language, in particular using metaphors within kennings and both metaphors and personification within etherees.

Following on from our work on shape in maths, we are now focussing on position and direction. This complements our work in geography where we have been busy looking at maps and grid references, as well as finding out more about the fascinating processes that govern the formation of different coastal features.

Over the last couple of weeks, we have been busy getting messy in Y5 in different and exciting ways. In science, as part of our unit of work on properties and changes of materials, we learnt about non-Newtonian fluids and investigated Oobleck, a mixture of corn flour and water that has some very interesting properties. Our classrooms have also been full of old socks, wool and scraps of material as we have started to create our puppets in DT. We're looking forward to seeing the finished articles!

We've been journalists in English - covering the brutal murder of Banquo in Macbeth, statisticians in maths - interpreting line graphs, and have learnt to safely perform forward and backward rolls in PE. To top it all off, the children's Djembe drumming sounds superb!

The end of last half term was marked by two special whole school events: Sir Mo Farah opening the new astro-turf and the school talent show. We were proud of all of our Y5 representatives and performers, whether they showcased their talents to the class or to the school, or helped put Sir Mo through his paces on the astro.

It's been lovely welcoming children back into Y5 after the half term break and we're excited about the action packed half term ahead of us. This week we've begun a unit of work in DT with children investigating existing puppet designs and looking at a timeline of the history of puppet-making. Later this term they will design, make and evaluate puppets linked to our core text: Macbeth. Speaking of which, we're moving on from concocting potions inspired by the Three Witches, to writing soliloquys. The only question is - will they have the same dire consequences as in Macbeth…?

Monday saw the culmination of many hours of practice and preparation as Y5 travelled to the O2 Arena to rehearse and perform to a packed audience as part of an 8500+ Young Voices choir (one of the largest choirs in the world). They were accompanied by a fabulous array of professional musicians, dancers and even pyrotechnics! Friends and family joined in the evening to share in the occasion. Here are some examples of the children's thoughts in response to the event:

          "A magical night with my friends."

          "Absolutely phenomenal!"

          "Too good to put into words."

         "A sky-full-of-stars experience."

A huge thank you to all of the staff, parents and of course, children, who contributed to this very special event.

And - not to diminish the rest of the week - Y5 have also been busy creating wonderful land art based on the work of Andy Goldsworthy, exploring the battlefield with Macbeth and extending their understanding and skills of both multiplication and division.