Welcome to Year 5

Hello and welcome to the Summer term here at St. Hild's! I hope you all had a lovely time over the Easter holidays and are ready and raring to go for the next term together. As always in Year 5, we have a lot of exciting opportunities planned that will keep us all very busy! 

Our topic this term is 'One Moment in Time' and this thread will run through a lot of the work we do across the curriculum. In history, we will be learning about World War Two and how this conflict has shaped the world we live in today. Whilst in geography, we will be learning all about wartime evacuation, focusing on where children were evacuated from and to and why. Our art topic will focus on the work of Abram Games - a WW2 propaganda poster printer. 

Our PE this term will be on a Wednesday afternoon so please come to school wearing your PE kit on this day. You will also need your reading book every day. 

I will keep you up to date with the exciting things we are getting up to via our Class Dojo page but if you ever have any questions, let me know. 

Mr Grant and Mrs White 

In gymnastics, we worked with a partner to practise counter balances that relied on our partner to keep us steady!

We completed non-chronological reports about the planet Pandora and presented them across a double page - they look fantastic!

In our art unit this year, we focused on the work of Picasso and tried to draw our own self portraits in his style - they look great!

We had a great session with Caitlin from the SSP who showed us a brand new game called 'End Zone' which we thought was great!

Year 5 had the chance to take part in a leadership afternoon this term to help develop our confidence and teamworking skills. Half of the class went to Maiden Castle to help deliver a sports event while the other half spent time in Early Years helping our youngest children in the forest school.

We were very lucky to be chosen to work with local artist Mick Stephenson this year to contribute to his Lumiere installation. It was great to be able to see our hard work on display in Durham city centre!

Chartwells visited us today and delivered a session where we taste-tested foods from a variety of different countries. We thought most of the new things were delicious (but a few didn't go down too well!). 

We worked with our visitors from the NSPCC to discuss what we can do to keep ourselves and others safe in difficult situations. 

To celebrate the European Day of Languages, we researched and practised how to say 'hello' in loads of different languages!

Year 5 September 2022 - July 2023

Our morning session with Captain Chemistry was so exciting - we could have kept going all day! We were hands on with a range of experiments including making our own acid detecting, colour-changing liquid, and (our personal favourite) The Whoosh Bottle!

The Quidditch festival we took part in was so much fun - we even had our very own Golden Snitch!

We spent a few weeks of our summer term learning and writing about bees: where they live, about their anatomy, and how they make honey. To finish the unit, we made honey flapjacks to enjoy (and wrote a secret recipe card too!).

In science, we experimented with how to separate individual components of a mixture by using techniques such as filtering, sieving and evaporating.

We went out onto the playground and measured how far apart each of the planets are (to scale) and couldn't believe how huge the distances became for planets like Neptune!

Our visit from Liz Million was awesome and the artwork we produced was so impressive!

We learnt some valuable, life-saving skills in our First Aid workshop!

We showcased our learning about the Solar System by creating these artistic posters to show a whole range of features :)

We loved trying Scatterball with the SSP - it was a great new sport which got us all active (and very competitive!)

Our DT unit this term was all about making Italian food. On Thursday, we tested a variety of different pasta sauces to find out which flavours we liked before following Gino D'Acampo's recipe to make pizza from scratch on Friday. It was a busy two days but the results were delicious!

We were thrilled to find out that our entry into the Lego 'Build the Change' challenge was chosen as the winner from the whole of the UK! We won 10,000 Lego bricks for the school (which we had to give a thorough testing to) and also had a professional photoshoot - it was a super experience! 

We had a fantastic time celebrating World Book Day in Year 5. We enjoyed our annual parade in the hall to show off our costumes before spending time creating our own books, listening to stories, and - most importantly - doing some reading of our own! :)

For our art project this half term, we created Roman tiles using the mosaic style. We tried to create images in the centre of our tiles using the mosaic effect. 

We enjoyed our session with Chartwells about the importance of healthy eating. We learnt about the Eatwell Plate, thought about our snack choices at home, and made some delicious chocolate and banana hummus to taste! 

Our history work on the Romans and our science work on levers and pulleys coincided when we made our own Roman catapults! We tried to stay historically accurate with how the catapult would have been fired but we also used our science knowledge about levers to make it fire as far as possible!

Pete from Emmanuel Church came to spend an afternoon with Y5 to show us how we could run our own prayer space. The activities gave us all a chance to reflect on what is important to us and helped us to think about how our behaviours can impact on other people.

We have loved coding with the MicroBits this term - there are so many different ways to code them that it was like a big investigation every lesson!

In science, we explored the force of air resistance by comparing how an object falls without a parachute and then with a parachute. The children gave some great answers afterwards as to why the parachute they made helped slow down their 'skydiver' :)

Our DT project this term was to create moving toys using a CAMs mechanism. After designing and planning our toy, we got to use saws to cut the wood to the right length and then use different techniques to join everything together. They turned out really well!

As always, the time before Christmas was exceptionally busy this year but we had a great time enjoying our Christmas parties, Christmas lunches and Christmas treats! 

While half the class were in the forest school, the other half gathered as many loose, natural materials as they could to create these lovely pieces of natural art which were inspired by flowers at the edge of the school field :) 

Our first computing unit this spring was looking at vector drawings. These are pictures that are made up of smaller shapes combined together to make a larger image. Some of our trial artwork was excellent 

At the start of our unit on fractions, we created our own fraction walls to help us spot equivalent fractions!

Our art this term has been focused around the 'Pop Art' style. The children really captured the vibrancy of this style with their artwork - they look like they could have come straight out of some comic books!

This term, we have enjoyed working with Marie-Claire from the SSP to develop our gymnastic skills of balancing, rolling and travelling. The final routines the children came up with were excellent! 

We had a great time in maths recording how-to videos explaining the methods we use for addition and subtraction. The children were naturals in front of the camera and made sure their videos were informative and entertaining!

Our willow weaving workshop was great fun and very calming too. The children all did a great job and you can see the artwork that they contributed to displayed on our school grounds 

In history today, we imagined that we were part of Howard Carter's team who had just discovered an ancient tomb. We crawled through our own version of the tomb, found artefacts inside, and discussed why they may have been buried with the young Pharaoh. 

As part of our learning about the Ancient Egyptians, we explored the process of mummification used to preserve bodies and then tried it out for ourselves using tomatoes. As you can see, our preserved 'bodies' lasted much better than the one left open to the air!

We worked together as a class team to create these pieces of collaborative artwork representing two of our school values - they look great!