Welcome back to Year 5 and the start of the Spring Term. We sincerely hope you had a peaceful and relaxing Christmas break! This half-term, our Year 5 blog will be taken over by a number of new authors from across the year group. This week, Malaika and Eva put pen to paper to recap all that incredible things we have learnt!

Keeping Us Safe

On Friday, Year 4 and 5 were visited by Loudmouth Education. They performed a series of short plays for use all about different forms of abuse and the ways that we can keep ourselves safe. Through these short plays, we learnt to identify the signs of abuse and the importance of the P.A.N.T.S rule in helping to keep us safe. These examples linked really well with our 'Taking Care Project' and the importance of our network. Later in the day, we took part in a short workshop to talk about some of the things we had seen and heard. This helped us to talk about the key messages and remind us of what we should do if we feel unsafe.

Engaging English

This half-term, our learning theme is 'Magical Muggles', so we have begun to read the first book in the Harry Potter series, 'Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone'. Within lessons, we have been practising applying some of our Key Skills, including using expanded noun phrases and fronted adverbials to add detail to our descriptions before practising our use of three-part speech to advance the action in the last couple of lessons.

Structure of 3-Part Speech:

" + what was said + , ? ! + " + who and how it was said (-ly) + , as/while + what they were doing whilst speaking.

"It can't be!" pleaded McGonagall sadly, as she stared into Dumbledore's grey, knowing eyes.

Marvellous Mathematics

In Mathematics, we have continued our learning of Fractions to subtract from a range of different fractions including mixed number and improper fractions. This meant that we had to use skills that we had learnt previously and use them to help use convert fractions before subtracting. We also spent one lesson reviewing rounding to the nearest 10, 100 and 1,000 as part of our Key Skill lesson.

Scintillating Science

In Science, we have started a new unit about the properties and changes of materials. During the first lesson of this unit, we recapped the characteristics of solids, liquids and gases and used this knowledge (originally taught in Year 4) to answer Sci's BIG question: "How do particles move differently in solids, liquids and gases?"

Melodic Music

This half-term, we will continue to work with Mr. Beavis-Berry from Warwick School to develop our knowledge and understanding of music. Within lessons, we are going to be exploring orchestral music through the work of John Williams (composer of the Harry Potter franchise music). We spent time, in the first lesson, watching an orchestra play 'Hedwig's Theme' and appraising it to consider what we liked, disliked and the purpose of the music. We then started to use the glockenspeils to try and find out what the opening notes for 'Hedwig's Theme' are.