As the half term approaches the final week, Year 5 have been busy working hard in their learning across all the subjects!
In History, we are learning about the ancient Maya and being guided by the following enquiry question: How unique were the Maya? Having explored different aspects of Maya culture, including their mathematics and writing system, this week our focus was on Maya beliefs. We delved deep into the gods and goddesses they worshipped and considered how their beliefs were different from that of other cultures we have been learning about.
In Maths, we continued working hard on fractions, exploring equivalence and how to prove if a fraction is equivalent or not. The children are growing in confidence with figuring this out, noticing how different calculations affect the numerator and denominator. For example, we know 1/3 is equivalent to 7/21 because 1×7=7 and 3×7=21: we did the same thing to the numerator and the denominator and discovered an equivalent fraction!
In English, we are continuing to explore the Ancient Maya in our writing. This week, the children have been creating stories using traditional Maya names and gods. From a year of floods to a deadly curse, the characters in their stories must find a way to save the rest of their village from despair inflicted by the gods. They have got really stuck into setting and character description, challenging themselves to work on their writing targets and create brilliant stories!
Our daily grammar skill has been on dialogue and using speech marks accurately in our writing.
In STEM, we have continued to build our knowledge of forces by exploring gears. Ms Lownsbrough did a live demonstration on her bike all about how gears work and the children had the opportunity work together to explain how different gear combinations help people cycle uphill, downhill and on a flat surface.
Spellings: This week we focused on the following words which all contain the ‘o’ phoneme:
Suppose notice possess potatoes possession noticeable though although and grown/groan
Home Learning
- Read for 30 minutes each day
- Practise times tables for 10 minutes each day
- Practise and revise year 3-4 and year 5-6 spellings that we have covered this autumn term to ensure they have been transferred from working memory to long term memory.
Please encourage your child to break the words down into syllables and sounds, just as we do in lessons in line with the Sounds-Write model.
We start by saying a word to the children, for example accommodate. We ask them how many syllables they can hear (4). We then provide them with all the sounds required to build the word but mixed up (a mm cc o o a-e t d). We then identify the sounds in each syllable and build the word syllable by syllable: a / cc o / mm o/ d a-e t). We then identify any potential challenges with the spelling – for example the double mm and double cc in accommodate. The children then use their sounds to build the word – initially in syllables (a / cc o / mm o/ d a-e t) and then as a single word without any syllable spaces (accommodate).
PE
Outdoor hockey: Wednesday
Indoor PE: Thursday
Please ensure children have weather appropriate PE uniform in school. This includes a hair band to tie back long hair and tape to cover any ear-rings that cannot be removed.
Mobile Telephones
Only children who have permission to walk home alone may bring a mobile telephone to school. It must be given to the class teacher at the start of each day and will be returned at home time.
Snowdonia
Parents, please respond to the Snowdonia questionnaire sent out by Mr Drane
Collection
Children will not be able to leave school alone unless parents have completed the online form via parentmail.
Children will not be released into the care of unfamiliar adults without prior notification and / or the provision of the child’s unique PIN number.
Have a fun weekend and see you next week when we will be drawing our Ancient Maya project to a close.
The Year 5 Team