Murray Class (Year 6)

Welcome to Murray Class

Mr Grant and Mrs Roddam

Welcome to the start of your final year of primary school here at St. Hild's! I hope you all had a wonderful, restful summer holiday and are all ready for an action-packed year full of fun, learning, and new responsibilities. Year 6 is a busy year in which you will continue to grow, mature, and prepare yourselves for the future. There are a lot of new things to learn and loads of new opportunities too so be ready to embrace it all with your best 'Shine Bright' mindset and make this year the best one yet!

I am very excited to be teaching you again this year, this time alongside Mrs Roddam. We have both had a lovely first few days in class and are looking forward to the rest of the year. Our Autumn Term whole school topic is "Where in the World Are We?" and we have lots of exciting things planned. We will be finding out about the Roman Empire and how they changed the world we live in for our history, conducting fieldwork studies for our geography, and creating Pop-Art inspired pieces in our art unit. And that is just a small sample of what we have in store!

If you ever have any questions, please get in touch.

Mr Grant and Mrs Roddam 

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!