Dear Parents/Guardians, Welcome back to the school year! Peter and the Wolf Base have already been hard at work this year – check out our class blog to see what has been going on so far! This year is full of exciting topics and activities for Year 5 and we are looking forward to taking the journey with your children! Below is an overview of what your children will be learning through the term – up until Christmas and this is supported by our class blog, especially our Literacy and Numeracy pages that will grow as we move on into the term. Our topic for the first half term is ‘The World and Us ’and this will be followed by a topic called ‘Peter and the Wolf’, which is not only our base name but will also link to our KS2 production as it is a fairy/folk tale. Literacy: We have started by looking at writing descriptively and have written character descriptions for the characters from Peter and the Wolf. Now, we have moved onto looking at stories by significant authors. We have started by looking at Michael Morpurgo and different types of story openings. This will lead onto developing our own writing of openings as well as writing a short story. We will then finish the term by looking at poetic style and developing our own. Numeracy: We start by focusing on counting, partitioning and calculating. This includes looking at place value and using our multiplication knowledge to find other facts. We will spend some time on mental and written methods for dividing and multiplying and develop our strategies for both. We will then move onto developing our understanding about shape including area and perimeter as well as data handling. RE: We have already started our RE as it links to our topic of The World and Us. We have used story making to retell the story of the Creation and considered what Christians could learn from it. We have also considered the Big Bang theory. We will be using ICT to create our own gardens and then link this to the story of Adam and Eve as well as considered God’s promise to Noah after the flood. We will also be learning about symbolism in these stories. Topic: As I have already mentioned, our first topic is ‘The World and Us’. The children have asked some very interesting questions and as you can see, we have already been learning through RE. We will be learning about how plants help the world, investigating how plants grow, disperse seeds and reproduce as well as planning and growing our own. We will also be exploring the patterns fruit and seeds make through art and we’ll finish by considering how recycling helps the world.
SEAL: We start with New Beginnings where the children consider the features of a good school and then consider their own class charter. We focus on feelings involved in new beginnings and how to deal with them. We then move onto Getting on and Falling out where the children learn about accepting difference in others and how to deal with falling out with friends. As you have already found out, the children have the opportunity to learn a brass instrument for 10 weeks. This is on a Wednesday morning and so far we have all of the instruments back for the second lesson including a lot of practice going on in between. Thank you for your support with this. Home learning will be set on a Thursday and due in the following Thursday. I will be running a home learning club on a Wednesday lunchtime where the children can come and ask for help, complete their homework or just get it out of the way before the weekend! You may also like to know that our library time for returning books and taking others out is a Monday afternoon. If you were able to come to our Meet the Teacher evening, then you will know that we are raising the profile of reading. The children are asked to bring their reading book and their reading record into school every day. This will not only help us but mean that they have the consistency of reading a complete book rather than reading bits here and there. We have also discussed how to record what they are reading and we are encouraging them to not only indicate which page they have read to, but to reflect on their reading as well. They could comment on what they like/don’t like, the characters and their actions, their opinion, a prediction of what is going to happen or questions that they might want answered. The important part is that they are explaining their ideas when recording and discussing them with you. I will be adding things to the blog to help support the children with this as well. On the subject of reading, if you would like to help with reading by becoming an adult reader, then please let the office know. Your help would be greatly appreciated! I hope that this answers all of your question and it just leaves me to say that if you have any questions or queries them do please come and see me to discuss it. We look forward to working with you!
Rachel Carrick and Sarah Thornton