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Good afternoon everyone!
We hope this blog update finds you all well, safe and sound, after what has been a truly stormy day. I am unsure whether you have power, internet connections, tiles on your roof, or fence panels left around your gardens so we are wishing you all well. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you need support with anything. Storm Eunice will certainly leave an imprint on our memories for a long time to come. As for our learning this week, (which sadly had to change very abruptly late yesterday afternoon), the end of the week has panned out differently than we had anticipated. However, the rest of the week has been as action packed as ever! Here are a few snippets... Science We completed our unit on heat by planning and carrying out an investigation to see which material was the best insulator and kept an ice cube frozen for the longest. The children had to consider which variables to control in order to ensure we carried out a 'fair test'. They then completed the end of unit test, which showed they had made good progress with their learning about thermal insulators and conductors. History We completed our lessons on Civil Rights with a lesson about #BlackLivesMatter to understand how the struggle for equal rights continue. The children then all wrote an essay to demonstrate their learning. I was extremely impressed by the way they took on this challenging task and they did really well. I was very proud of them! PSHE We have begun thinking about our 'digital wellbeing' and looked at the positives and negatives of the Internet. As half term begins, we learnt that it is important to limit screen time and, when the weather allows, children should get out and enjoy themselves too. I hope that they will use some of their screen time to revise for Miss Radbourne's Grand Geography Quiz, which will be happening after half term- please see the school Dojo page for more information. Maths We completed our unit on Decimals, culminating with an end of unit test for assessment. All the children have made great progress with this area of learning and were really pleased with themselves! English We finished with our Cloudbusting invent stage of our unit, by writing our own narratives, through poetry. The children then self assessed to check they had written in the appropriate style, using the success criteria. Class Assembly We also spent a little bit of time practising our class assembly which will now take place on 4th March, due to Storm Eunice. The children have all used drama to retell a favourite poem of theirs! Finally... we wish you all a very happy half term. Can you believe we are now officially over half way through the academic year? I certainly can't! Lets hope next half term is kinder to us all in terms of weather and illness. Take care and thank you. Mrs Ware and Miss Ruby Good afternoon....Good afternoon everyone, here is a brief roundup of our week together. Poetry We have been enjoying poetry in our English lessons and in guided reading this week. The children particularly like Michael Rosen's 'Strict' poem. Look out for a performance of this next week in our parent's assembly. We are now ready to write our own version of some of the events from our shared text Cloud Busting and will be telling the story from a different character's perspective using a range of poetic devices. The children have already shown a natural talent for writing poems so I'm really looking forward to what they produce next week. Computing The children have nearly completed their websites and have learnt how to create internal links to subpages within their website; external links to other websites as well as embedding web pages from other websites on their own. Children's Mental Health Week We watched an online assembly which asked us to think about how we can grow emotionally and who can support us with our emotional growth. The children identified parents and other family members as well as teachers and other school staff and their friends and peers. I asked the children to identify something positive about themselves/something they are good at or have improved. Some found this difficult - it is easy to identify something we're not good at or can't do, but we always find it hard to be more positive about ourselves. Some children were also able to identify a target for their emotional growth. We marked Children's Mental Health Week with 'Dress to Express' today! Maths We have continued with our unit of work focusing on decimals. This week we have divided decimals by 10, 100 and 1000, multiplied decimals by integers, divided decimals by integers and used division to solve problems involving decimals. Next week we will conclude our unit and look towards our new one percentages. PE The children are getting so much more confident in the swimming pool. They have used a range of apparatus to support them (such as woggles and floats) and have practised different strokes to swim across the pool. Some children have also swam lengths of the pool using different strokes and have practised jumping into the deep end, developing their confidence. Religion and World Views We have continued with our focus on Hinduism in World Views and Religion. We have understood the meanings of Karma, Dharma and Samsara and how they fit together. They children played a traditional Hindu game called Moksha Chitram to understand these things and discuss how this game is like real life and what it can teach people about Hindu beliefs. DT The children designed and began to make their ‘Steady Hand Games’. This involved drawing sketches of their designs and reasons for their choices. They then chose a net of a shape to create the base of their game. We look forwards to making the actual ‘game’ next week, which involves an electrical circuit with a buzzer. French We are beginning to learn how to say our ages and starting to learn dates and birthdays. We hope you a have a good weekend! A few highlights of our week!
English We have been reading the book Cloud Busting which is a story about childhood, being different and covers the themes of friendship, diversity and bullying. The story is told through various types of poetry and we have really enjoyed reading it together. In our English lessons, we will be looking deeper into the way the story is told and will be writing our own stories through poetry based on the viewpoints of different characters in the book. We were really impressed with the children's elicitation tasks where they showed a great deal of talent for writing poetry. Maths We have begun our new unit of work focusing on decimals. This week has seen revision of some of the Year 5 objectives in maths to recap learning that happened during the last lockdown. The focus has been on understanding decimals to two decimal places (2dp), understanding thousandths, decimals to three decimal places (3dp) and multiplying decimals by 10, 100 and 1000. This week we have used lots of manipulatives (resources such as place value charts, place value counters, gattegnocharts and base 10) and have taken photos for our books and working wall. Science Our lesson this week was about heat transfer and conduction. We were able to observe conduction by heating a knife above a candle and seeing how the end of the knife became warm as the particles in contact with each other transferred the heat along the knife. It is really good to be able to carry out this type of investigation with them as they begin to show much more maturity. History In history this week, we read and performed an abridged version of Martin Luther King's "I have a dream speech". We learnt that the march on Washington in 1963, in which over 250,000 people from all over America gathered at the Lincoln Memorial to demand civil rights and economic equality for all Americans, culminated with this historical speech. PSHE (Life Lessons) We discussed stereotypes, learnt what they were and how/why they exist. We thought of ways to challenge stereotypes. Some excellent ideas from the children were: "Call them out!" and "Prove them to be wrong." World Religions and Views We have been finding out about the Hindu beliefs of Samsara, Karma, Dharma and Moksha and asking "Why do Hindus try to be good?" We read and interpreted the story of the man in the well and we found our interpretation of the story to be very different to that of a Hindu. It has been really interesting to study a religion with its origins from a culture very different to our own. PE This week we have been incredibly active! Relay races, gymnastics, swimming and a cross country event! The cross country event in Simmons Park, Okehampton, was the first of three races that will take place over the year. The children were placed into teams and ran approximately one and half miles through mud track and footpaths. They all did incredibly well and showed huge resilience, positivity and teamwork! |
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May 2025
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