Maths: dividing and multiplying with fractions
Children in Year 6 have been thinking about how to represent number sentences using pictures. They have been telling stories to help them understand the concept of dividing a fraction by a whole number.
Living & Learning: I know the importance of a healthy diet
Children discussed the Eatwell Guide from the NHS. They designed a day a food that would fit into the guide.
Help at home: Discuss dinner options with your child. What would their ideal healthly meal be? How could you switch out an item to make your meal even healthier?
Forest School Fun
The Year 5’s have been having a great time at Forest School every Monday and the rain yesterday didn’t even dampen their spirits. The children have had the opportunity to create some bug hotels to encourage insects to the site. Yesterday, they put their culinary skills to the test and made some garlic flatbreads. They cooked these on the fire and they were delicious! The children arrived back at class absolutely covered in mud but they’d had so much fun.
Reading: Beware the Jabberwocky!
Year 5/6 have been reading poetry this week. We have read and analysed Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll. Children retrieved information from the text and drew what they thought the Jabberwocky might look like.
Help at home: enjoy the poem together. Have fun trying to work out what each word means. Some words are two words spliced together.
Living and Learning: I know the importance of personal hygiene, including handwashing
This week, Year 5/6 have been learning about personal hygiene. We watched some videos about the importance of using a tissue when sneezing. We discussed the difference between using hand soap and sanitiser. Children were shocked to learn that at any point in the day you might be in contact with 10,000,000,000,000 (10 quadrillion) microbes.
Help at home: discuss the importance of washing hands at key points in the day.
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.
