Welcome to Year 5

Welcome back to the Summer Term at St. Hild's. I can't believe that we are already in the final term of the year - time is flying by! We still have plenty of time this term though to keep learning, having fun, and enjoying Year 5.

This term, our whole school topic is 'Voyage of Discovery' and we have lots of exciting learning opportunities planned to get the most out of this topic. As part of this, we get to learn about The British Monarchy to see how kings and queens have shaped the history of our country and contributed to our country today. 

Our PE this term will be on a Tuesday afternoon so please come to school in your kit on this day. 

Homework will be sent home on a Friday and should be returned to school by the following Wednesday. Please also bring your reading book to and from school every day and try to read as much as possible at home. 

We look forward to another great term,

Mr Grant and Mrs White 

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!