English:

Year five have enjoyed Spinechillers this half term, they have studied “Alma” which was a short film where a little girl wanders into a deserted snowy town. We see Alma writing her name in chalk on a wall and then noticing a creepy shop full of dolls. We focused, in our own writing, on building suspense using ellipsis and speculating on what might happen next. We made predictions based on a piece of music and mapped our emotions as they were experienced listening in the classroom. We explored those emotions and the vocabulary we could use to describe them. We also wrote an action setting description. securing Year 5 grammar, spelling and punctuation skills.

Maths:

We have revised our knowledge and skills in fractions, percentages and decimals. We have been practising and securing key arithmetic methods which will help us to start Year Six in the best possible place. This has been done through written methods and also using practical Maths sessions where the children are able to get more hands on and to have some fun as well.

Science:

Our focus for this half term has been Animals Including Humans. We have learned key vocabulary such as Fertilisation and Prenatal. We have also investigated how information is presented in different types of graphs, how to interpret the information (Data) and compare and contrast this information. We have also entered information into our own graphs making sure that it is accurate and clear to read. We learnt how humans grow from being a baby right through to growing older. It was interesting to discover both the physical and other changes that happen and how this is shown or felt by a human.

Humanities:

During our humanities lessons, we were answering the ancillary question ‘How do volcanoes affect the lives of people on Hiemaey?’. We identified, recognised and described different photographs of landscapes where we would find volcanoes, we labelled all the different parts of a volcano, we categorised different features accordingly if they were human geography or physical geography, we were able to mark key features on a map. One of our key vocabulary words that we studied was ‘archipelago’ and we were able to locate them on a map of Europe. We also drew conclusions and made judgements based on the evidence, we also looked at different key vocabulary- volcanologist, we also explored how and why volcanos are formed, what the physical changes are following an eruption and we speculated on the effects of the volcanic eruption.

PSHE: 

In PSHE this half term the children have been looking at how old you need to be to do different things. They have looked at age restrictions on games and films and why they are there. They have discussed case studies and talked about the affects of accessing activities which are above your own age. On-line gaming was a very popular topic with Year Five. We looked at how much time we all spent on our different technologies whether this is a phone, a tablet or laptop and how long is actually safe for our age group. Two hours at a time was our maximum. We also looked for signs that may show us that on-line content or a game is becoming unsafe or unhelpful for example making us moody or tired or even angry when we don’t win.

Music:

We have listened to parts of The Planet Suite by Gustav Holst, compared the mood between Mars, The Bringer of War and Venus, The Bringer of Peace and studied a little about the composer.

We listened to the ‘Mars’ Ostinato and played it by firstly clapping the rhythm then using drums playing it with a crescendo and diminuendo.