December

December has felt a short but busy month for Year 5 – filled with glitter and sparkle.

In English, we became historians by researching and writing detailed information texts about the 1600s. Our report covered fascinating topics including the life of Samuel Pepys, the dramatic events of the English Civil War, and the devastating Great Fire of London.

In Mathematics, we launched our new unit on Fractions, spending time revising previously taught concepts to build a strong foundation for new learning. We used practical resources to help us identify and make fractions of shapes and enjoyed a creative lesson devising and presenting fractions that we made from materials found around the classroom. So far we have made equivalent fractions and will be finding fractions of amounts as we begin the new year. 

We were fortunate enough to collaborate with a local architect who came into school and demonstrated how to construct a replica building that would have replaced the many buildings lost in the devastation of the Great Fire of London. The children's efforts to recreate homes, schools and places of worship was fantastic, and they should be very proud of their projects. 

To celebrate the festive season, we got creative in Art and Design, making lovely Christmas cards and calendars to take home to show families. The highlight for many was definitely our end-of-term celebration, where we thoroughly enjoyed dancing at our Christmas party (including the adults).

November

November has been a fantastic and busy month for Year 5! As the weather has turned colder, we've noticed the seasonal change and are definitely starting to wrap up warm for our outdoor play during break and our exciting OPAL sessions at lunchtime. This month, we really embraced the great outdoors and got wonderfully creative with outdoor art and pallet building activities. 

Nature Conservation: We were very lucky to work with the brilliant organisation Ground Works. Together, we built fantastic bug hotels using old pallets. This was a great hands-on experience, and we are helping create safe habitats for local insects in our school grounds. 

Our art lessons this month were truly memorable! We explored the world of real-life art installations, and this involved some extremely messy painting techniques. We'd encourage all parents to ask their children about these installations—they certainly had fun getting their hands (and maybe a bit more) covered in paint – apologies for the paint splatters. 

In Science, we became experts as we delved into our unit on States of Matter. We conducted a wide range of engaging experiments to investigate and observe solids, liquids, and gases. We explored concepts like melting, freezing, and evaporation, which really brought the scientific process to life.

Our RE lessons this month focused on exploring the Jewish faith. A real highlight was having the opportunity to meet a member of the Jewish community via an online meeting platform. They shared incredible insights into their life and faith, and we got to learn loads about their beautiful artifacts and their significance. It was a fascinating and respectful way to broaden our understanding of the world.

October

We have all settled so well into Year 5 and we are all working so hard. Well done, everyone! 

In maths, we've been working on understanding the place value of numbers up to 1,000,000 and have been learning how to round these numbers to the nearest 10, 100, 1,000, 10,000 and 100,000! 

In English, we have been reading more of our class book, Fire! Fire! by Stuart Hill and have written amazing descriptions of a setting and we are now working on how to write a diary entry. We are learning lots of new writing techniques, such as parenthesis and how to write relative clauses within sentences. 

Science is one of our favourite subjects and our topic is solids, liquids and gases. We're most happy when we are carrying out our scientific investigations and speaking like scientists. 

Our favourite subject this term is most certainly history, where, at the moment, we are delving into The Gunpowder Plot. As historians, we are looking at a variety of sources of evidence, analysing their significance and presenting our findings. It's all a bit gory with talk of torture and death penalties! 

We're doing well in all other subjects too, and we're covering things like singing The 12 Bar Blues, playing chords on glockenspiels and a keyboard, building robots that we can program, exploring what it means for some people to follow the Jewish faith and learning how to play cricket. 

September

Welcome back to a brand-new year at Jarrow Cross. All the staff in Year 5 would like to give a huge welcome to our new classes and their families as you all join us in this fresh new chapter. 

The children arrived looking fantastic in their new uniforms and certainly appear to be ready to learn, smile and explore the Year 5 curriculum with us. We began the term with a whole school book, ''Our Class is a Family'', which we enjoyed reading and used as a stimulus for a range of writing and drawing tasks. 

For the rest of the term, we will travel back in time to the 1600s, where we will be digging deep into disease, politics and disaster. We have already started our class book Fire! Fire! by Stuart Hill, which depicts the tragedy of The Great Fire of London in an exciting and dramatic tale. A tale which we hope will inspire our own budding authors this year in English.