Writing: Suspense, Shadows and Semi-colons
This week in writing, the children have been turning into masters of suspense. We have been learning how authors carefully build tension in a story to keep the reader hooked and wanting to know what happens next.
The children have been planning and writing their own terrifying narratives, set in places like dark bedrooms, quiet woods and even a terrifying old hotel. Our main focus has been on the different ways writers can build tension. The children have been experimenting with short, snappy sentences, describing what characters can see, hear and feel, and choosing vocabulary for effect so the reader can really imagine the moment.
We have also been practising how to use semi-colons to join two closely linked clauses together in a sentence; a small piece of punctuation that can make writing flow beautifully when used correctly.
There have been some wonderfully eerie ideas appearing across the classroom, and it has been brilliant seeing the children carefully plan their stories and then build the suspense step by step.
Help at home: ask your child to tell you about the spooky narrative they are writing. Can they explain how they are building tension or show you where they have used a semi-colon in their work?
Reading
We’ve been reading Jabberwocky this week in reading. This is a poem written by Lewis Carroll, who also wrote Alice in Wonderland. This is a nonsense poem about the main character killing a creature called ‘the Jabberwock’. The children had to read the poem and make sense of all the nonsense vocabulary. They managed to pick out and retrieve some description of the Jabberwock. The drew their representations of what they thought it would look like. There were some interesting ideas!
Forest Schools and Bikeability
It’s a busy half term for our year 5 students. They have started Forest School and have Bikeability to look forward to next week.
Forest School has been a huge success for the children. Perhaps not so much for parents with all those muddy clothes! From playing in the mud kitchen to bug hunting, children are picking up plenty of new skills and learning to play alongside each other imaginatively.
Bikeability is also another great opportunity to pratcise skills and learn resilience and take safe risks.
Help at home: Get ahead by taking a family bike ride this weekend. Head out to the woods for some imaginative play.
Year 5 Maths: Decimals and Conversions
This half term in maths, Year 5 have been working hard on multiplying by decimals and converting units of measurement. The children have been using their knowledge of place value and times tables to help them multiply decimals accurately, thinking carefully about how numbers shift when we multiply by tenths, hundredths and thousandths.
The children have also been exploring different units of measurement and practising converting between them, such as millimetres, centimetres, metres and kilometres. The children have shown great perseverance when tackling some tricky multi-step problems, and it has been brilliant to see them explaining their thinking and helping each other spot patterns in the maths.
Help at home: See if your child can spot measurements around the house or when out and about, from millimetres on a ruler to kilometres on road signs, and challenge them to convert between them!
World Book Day
We’ve had a great day celebrating World Book Day today and the children looked fantastic in their costumes. We spent the day talking about our favourite books, reading to younger children and completing some interesting activities.
Science – we’re biologists
We are biologists!
Our unit this term is all about animals including humans. This means we are being biologists because we are studying living things. We’ve been looking at the human life cycle from being a foetus to becoming an elderly adult later in life. There were many jokes about where the teachers were in this life cycle!
This week, we looked at some data about how the mass of a baby increases over time and we compared the mass of male and female babies. We plotted this information into a line graph to show the difference.
Topic – computing
We have started our new topic this week – computing. We began by looking at our new vocabulary and talking about how confident we felt about each word. We then began to learn about search engines and how they work. The children were introduced to the idea that search engines use web crawlers to locate webpages with relevant information on. They then store these in an index, which is a huge database. When you search something online, it searches the index for relevant webpages and an algorithm ranks them in order of relevance. Who knew all this went on in the background when you quickly search on the internet for something?!
Here is the vocabulary we are using this term.
Help at home: Can you help your child learn the vocabulary? Maybe play a game of Pictionary.
Internet Safety Day
On Tuesday, we spent the day celebrating Internet Safety Day. In Year 5 and 6 we focused on personal information and being critical users online. The children discussed what personal information was, such as your address and date of birth and when you might be asked for this information. This lead onto talking about downloading apps and how you should always ask an adult before anything is downloaded. The children confidently spoke about how to make sure privacy settings were in place on their devises. As a class, we looked at some online hoaxes and talked about how we need to be aware of false information online. The children were clear that disinformation is the spreading of false information with the intention of deceit, whereas misinformation is sharing false information by mistake.
Help at home: Use the following website to find out more about how to keep personal data safe online.
Reading – Viking Boy
As we continue to enjoy Viking boy as our class novel, we have been making sure that we remember the key parts of the story. We’ve been using story maps to help with this. Each time we read a chapter, we have been adding to our maps, noting down a five word summary of the main events. This is sometimes quite a challenge as lots can happen in a chapter! We sometimes add illustrations to help us remember too.
Living and Learning
I know the importance of the emergency services.
This is our living and learning statement for this week and we have been seeing whether the children know all the emergency service and when they would need to call them. The children now know that they can call 999 or 112 in an emergency and be able to contact the police, fire service, ambulance or the coastguard. We talked about different scenarios so that they were clear which service they would ask for.
We watched a short video explaining what information they’d be asked for if they rang an ambulance. The children found this useful as it isn’t something you have to do every day and emergency situations can be quite stressful. We also had chance to learn some simple first-aid techniques which the children could use if needed.
Help at home: Watch the video again with your child and make sure they’d know how to react in an emergency.