After a lovely half term break, Year 5 returned eager to dive back into their learning. In a busy week, we have seen parent-teacher conferences, children returning to school amid the introduction of lockdown 2.0 and a rather interesting talk about the birds and bees. Despite a rather packed schedule, it really has been a delightful first week back.

Learning this week

In our Guided Reading lessons this week, we have introduced our new text, ‘The Jamie Drake Equation’ (which links nicely to our topic, ‘Space’). Before we started our text, we put on our detective hats and studied the book cover trying our best to make accurate predictions as to what the book might be about. Later in the week, after finding a series of statements about the protagonist (Jamie Drake), we had to dive into the text to discover whether the statements were true or false. In English, we continued along our space theme, studying the characters of various aliens we had discovered (see picture), including an alien created by Jamie Drake himself. Meanwhile, in Maths, we developed our place value skills; partitioning, ordering and representing numbers in a variety of ways. In PSHE, our Year 5’s discussed different strategies for managing emotions, challenges and change. This week also saw Year 5 learn about human life cycles and important changes the body goes through during puberty. Across the whole of Year 5, we were incredibly impressed with the level of maturity shown by the children in class discussions and the openness displayed when asking important questions.

Learning next week

Next week, in English, we will continue with our space inspired work, describing different alien worlds that we find in the ‘Goldilocks zone’. Later in the week, we’ll even get a chance to create and describe our own alien world. In Guided Reading, we continue with our new story, learning more about Jamie Drake’s adventure and putting Jamie’s dad (Commander Dan Drake) in the hot seat to ask important questions about his upcoming mission. In Maths, we take a detailed look at the four operations as we tackle multi-step word problems. In PSHE, we are focusing on kindness, healthy relationships and empathy, 

Finally, Love to Learn books will be handed out on Monday and the children's first task will be to decorate their books, both front and back.