Author: Mr Catherall

Yesterday, we kick started our new big topic: class novel (Kensuke’s Kingdom).

We started off by studying the front cover and the blurb. We made predictions about what might happen:

Then, we enjoyed reading the first chapter (we each had our own copy, too). Ask your child if they can summarise what happened in one sentence, 10 words, five words then for a challenge one word! After chapter 1, we used what we’d found out to make more informed predictions:

As the story is about a boy whose family go on a round the world yachting trip, in our topic lesson, we revised some of our geography knowledge. This week, we focussed on the countries and capital cities of Europe.

Ask your child to name as many European countries or capital cities as they can. For a challenge, ask them to explain what a bordering country is. Even more difficult, ask them to explain what the term ‘landlocked’ means and give you an example.

Today, Year 5 we’re visited by West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service. Luckily, there wasn’t an emergency (or a cat stuck up a tree). They visited to educate us about some basic fire safety.

We began by learning about the importance of smoke alarms – almost all of us said we had a smoke alarm which is great! Ask your child how often smoke alarms should be checked.

After watching a video of a fire taking hold (the smoke alarm went off after 20 seconds and by 3 minutes the room was completely engulfed in thick, black smoke), we thought about a few points that could keep us safe n the event of a fire:

• Close all doors before going to bed.
• Alert everyone in the house immediately.
• Put a pillow or duvet behind the door to stop smoke getting entering your room (standard house doors can resist a fire for roughly 15 minutes).
• Check smoke alarms regularly.
• Try and stand near an open window.

One of the most important things to do is to create a fire action plan. A fire action plan should be discussed as a family and means that everyone in the house knows exactly what to do in the event of a fire. When creating your fire action plan, the following points are important ones to consider…

• How will you let everyone else in the house know?
• Is there a room in the house that could be a ‘safe room’? Everyone must be able to access this room easily. A room with a sturdy door and big windows is ideal.
• Does everyone know where the keys for external doors are kept? Being able to exit the property swiftly could be crucial.
• When leaving the property, stay close to the floor.
• Who will call 999 and using what phone?
• Are there obstructions on the way out of the house?
• Does everyone in the house know who is there and what the address is? These are the two most important pieces of information that 999 call handlers will need to know.

Help your child by discussing the key points above with them. Even better, make a fire action plan.

Challenge your child by asking them to explain the triangle of fire.

This week, Year 5 have practised a rang of reading skills using the same non-fiction text.

We started off by exploring and evaluating the text. This is a great way of ensuring we understand a text (and ones with read before) and helps us to become critical, reflective readers – we really enjoy it, too!

Challenge your child by completing the same activity with them about a book they’re reading at home.

Then, we practised our retrieval skills. However, we’re pretty good at retrieving information from the text so we had a challenge. Instead of being given the questions, we were given the answer and had to work out what the question would’ve been. Help at home by trying this strategy when you’re reading with your child.

In our next lesson, we learnt how to tell the difference between facts and opinions. We applied our knowledge by identifying some facts and opinions from the text. As a challenge, we created our own.

In our final lesson, we read and analysed another non-fiction text:

We evaluated the articles against each other, formed our own opinions and looked for similarities and differences. Ask your child which article they preferred and why.

This week, in our writing lessons, we’ve made up our own Star Wars inspired beasts. After recapping some previous learning earlier in the week (determiners, parenthesis, expanded noun phrases – ask your child to explain each of these terms) we worked in pairs to write a short descriptive paragraph about an animal from a book about Star Wars characters, which was really cool!

Then, we created – using some images from the book as a prompt – our own beasts!

Next week, we’re going to write a non-chronological report based on our beastly creations.

Ask your child about their creature – what could they write about?

Challenge your child by asking them to identify the relative clauses in this news post.

Today, in our topic lesson, we progressed our materials (what’s the matter?) learning by testing different every day materials to find out if they are opaque, magnetic and can conduct electricity. We worked scientifically to carry out the investigation, recording our results as we went.

Next, we’ll record our results using a 3 way Venn diagram.

This afternoon, we started learning about our new mini topic: What’s the matter? In this topic, we’ll be learning lots of new science knowledge as well as progressing our working scientifically skills.

For our first lesson, we focussed on different everyday materials and their properties. We thought about what would happen if everyday objects were made from different materials…

To help keep our conversations focussed and scientific we tried to use key vocabulary:

• transparent
• translucent
• opaque
• rigid
• strong
• conductive
• magnetic

Ask your child if they can explain what each of these terms means!

To show how much we learnt, at the start of the lesson we said everything we knew about a 2p coin (first thoughts). Before repeating this again at the end of our learning – you’ll notice that our second thoughts are much more scientific.