Welcome back! Hope you all had a lovely Easter break! Please see our new knowledge organiser for this half term. We will be continuing with our letters from the lighthouse text and focusing on the history of World War 2 during our RE lessons. We are starting our new topics alongside this to include Geography, in which we will study the different biomes and compare the physical and human geographical features of the Alps and the Grand Canyon before exploring the Amazon rainforest. We are also excited to start learning to play the ukulele this half-term and look forward to sharing videos of our progress! In science we are continuing to investigate electricity.

Weekly Updates

Also in English this week, we looked at writing a powerful, emotive speech, from the perspective of Olive, to encourage the Budmouth Point locals to help a fallen German Pilot when he was injured. The children had to apply their skills of modal verbs, subjunctive clauses and persuasive techniques to make their speech impactful. To help with their arguments the children paired up and took on the roles of olive or the locals and debated their points justifying them with explanations.
 

In English we completed our suspense stories, making sure that we had a build up to slowly revealing the suitcase.
 

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In maths the children are all impressing me with their application of place value knowledge to addition and subtraction of decimals.

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We continued learning about the life of the Jewish people during World War 2 this week considering the kinder transport and then looking at the life of Anne Frank. The children dealt with the sensitive subject matter with great respect.

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We also completed our ukulele lessons by revisiting our G chord that we learnt when we did the national anthem in our 4 chord progressions. We then tried to introduce a strumming pattern, which proved challenging but we gave it a good go. I know some of the children have ukuleles at home so can keep practising at home.

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This last week we have completed our geography topic by looking at the impact humans are having on the world as a result of deforestation, leading to global warming and destruction of animals habitats. The children were particularly moved by this Greenpeace advert and have produced some great posters to inform people about deforestation.

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Our spellings this week relate to the ie or ei digraphs (to make the ee sound) and we have learnt that you usually use “i before e except after c”. Other words using the ei digraph can have different phonetic pronunciation, for example in vein, height and leisure.

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Also this week we have had our trials for the district sports events that will take place next week. The children blew us away with their enthusiasm to participate, their determination to do their best, their perseverance to complete all events and their resilience and good-sportsmanship when they did not win. We’re so proud of our year 5 athletes!

In PE the children are progressing well using the tennis rackets to maintain a rally, allowing only one bounce and learning not to return it if it will land outside of the court boundaries.

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In maths this week we have looked at reflection and how the images are reversed. The children are getting good at using their knowledge of coordinates, using the mnemonic “Turn on the Xbox before you watch YouTube” to remember the the x coordinate comes before the y.

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In guided reading the children created story maps to describe the water cycle, taking inspiration from ‘Drop’ by Emily Kate Moon and ‘The rhythm of the rain’ by Grahame Baker-Smith. They then used this knowledge to create their own water cycle in a bag during their geography lesson.

This week in geography we moved down to South America and have researched the Amazon rainforest, learning about the Amazon river (the largest by volume), the layers of the rainforest and the biodiversity.

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This week we have re-visited the F chord on our ukulele playing the chord progression from C to A minor then to F beautifully in our rendition of Happier by Ed Sheeran and managing to keep the steady rhythmic beat.

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In English last week we wrote Ephraim’s diary entry from the day he received Olive and Cliff as evacuees, including his thoughts and feelings about this turn of events.

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In RE last week the children learnt about the Kristallnacht and immersed themselves in the sights and sounds of the night, imagining how it would have felt to be a Jew at that time, then created some impactful poems to reflect what it was like.

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Last week in geography we explored the Grand Canyon in Arizona, USA. The children learnt about the formation of the Grand Canyon using the DUDE acronym (deposition, uplift, down-cutting and erosion) and compared this with how the Alps were formed. They also looked at the differences in the human geography of the two locations, exploring where the two tribes had settlements and how they use the land (including for tourism) then compared that to the settlements and land use in the Alps.

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Last week we moved into the hall for our morning lessons whilst the Year 6 completed their SATs. The children were amazing and dealt with the change very well.

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We ended our day having a Royal rave in the hall. A great day to lead us into the celebration weekend! hope you all had a fantastic time whatever you were doing over the weekend! I look forward to hearing all your stories on Tuesday.

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We then spent our afternoon learning two new chords for our ukulele so we could try to play God Save the King. This was very challenging only being our 3rd ever lesson on ukulele so I was very proud of all their efforts and think they did an amazing job having only had one session to learn it. We did two final renditions - one with everyone just playing the ukulele and then one where a small group of children volunteered to sing instead of play.

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We had a fantastic day doing activities for the coronation on Friday! The children really impressed me with their portrait sketching of King Charles III and Queen Camilla. 

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In our maths fluency this week we learnt a new method for multiplying 2-digit numbers together using just our knowledge of doubling, multiplying by 10 and halving, to create 'coins' that we can add together.

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In Geography this week we have been focusing in on The Alps. We have watched some virtual tours, explored the region on google Earth and compiled lots of information on to our visual representation of The Alps. 

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In science this week we conducted our electricity experiments to investigate the effects of changing the voltage applied to a component. Some groups found that adding more cells (increasing the voltage) made their bulb get brighter or their buzzer get louder. Others found that when adding more and more buzzers or bulbs the cells eventually do not have enough voltage to power that many components and they will not work.

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In Jigsaw this week we thought about all our positive personal qualities and discovered that the way we see ourselves may not be the same as the way other people see us. We learnt about self-esteem and ways we can boost our own self-esteem by focusing on the positives. 

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In Geography we have been researching the countries of Europe. We started with a competition to see who could name the most countries in Europe. Then after exploring the names and locations of the countries we challenged ourselves to improve our scores. Everyone impressed me with their improved scores with some remembering up over 30 countries! We then each looked in more depth at some of the countries to discover their capital cities, land area, population, highest point and longest river. We will be comparing our findings next week!

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This week in Music we have been applying our skills of chord progression from C to A minor to a song. We had to focus on the beat of the song to ensure we were strumming in time.

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In English we have started to write a story about finding another clue to Sukie's disappearance (one of the characters in letters from a lighthouse). The children have come up with some fantastic plans for their stories, including finding film negatives in a shoe heel (inspired by Zander's recent visit to Germany)! I look forward to sharing their stories over the next week. 

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In maths this week we started a new topic looking at geometry and angles. We started with a recap of quarter turns, half turns, three-quarter turns and whole turns using a game of Simon Says and by the end of the day they were using 90 degree, 180 degree, 270 degree and 360 degree to describe the turns. Clockwise and anticlockwise proved a bit trickier so we will keep practising over the next week!

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We were very excited to get out the ukuleles on Thursday. We learnt how to hold them and what all of the parts of the instrument were and what the strings were called (ask the children what the mnemonic is to remember the letters of the strings). Then we had a go at playing a C chord and an A-minor chord (bit trickier as you have to make sure your fingers are not pressing down on any of the other strings!). Finally we had a go at switching between the C chord and the A-minor chord (chord progression) increasing our speed as we got better at it! I was so impressed with them during this lesson and I am really looking forward to seeing how great they become on the ukuleles! (Video to follow)

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On Wednesday we started our new geography topic were we became experts in the different biomes. The children had to research different biomes and then present their findings in front of the class.

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We have had a fun first week back! On Tuesday the children started to learn skills needed for tennis in their first PE lesson this half-term. This involved keeping on their toes and improving their reaction speeds to reach and touch the ball before it has bounced twice on the floor.