Welcome to Year 5S!

Year 5S is taught by me, Miss Stokes, and I am supported by a wonderful team of teaching assistants!

This school year will be full of new exciting challenges and themes to support our learning! To help everyone to adjust and to settle in to their new class, please take note of the following information about our weekly routine. 

Physical Education:

Our PE days are Wednesday and Friday. 

It is very important that children are equipped with their kit for all of their PE lessons and that those who wear earrings can either take them out or cover them up with protective tape.

Forest School:

From this week (Wednesday 6th September) our first block of forest school sessions will take place with Mrs Carter, in place of our Wednesday PE session. 

Reading:

We love reading together and rewarding independent reading in our class! Children are expected to bring their book and reading record to school everyday. This will help them to gain organisational skills which they will need in the very near future when they transition to high school. All children have been organised into an author team group and their reading diaries will be monitored once every week (a sticker on the front of their reading diary will remind them which is their day to be checked). If staff can see that children are reading regularly and are signing their book, showing what page they are up to, then they will achieve a team point for their whole school author group. At the end of the term, the author group with the most tokens wins a prize!

Homework:

Homework will be given out on Friday and will be due to be handed in the following Wednesday. 

Children can attend homework club on Tuesdays.

Autumn Term

Our First theme this year is 'Festivals of Colour'. Watch this space to see what we get up to! 

Our Simchat Torah Experience

Year 5 have been learning about Judaism, looking at their place of worship, religious artefacts and traditional Jewish celebrations. The other week, we celebrated Simchat Torah the festival that marks the end of one whole year reading the Torah every Saturday (Shabbat) in Synagogue. 

The children were fantastic and really got into the spirit of things, nobody more so than our fantastic Rabbi Finleigh!

We celebrated with blessings, music, dancing and even a sweet treat at the end!

Last Thursday, we had Ann (a specialist teacher of Judaism) come to visit us. We learned about Shabbat (the Jewish holy day) and it's connection to the Torah. On Shabbat, Jewish families share Challah (bread) and grape juice, we really enjoyed trying this as part of our afternoon. We also learned more about the Synagogue and the Torah, the children asked some fantastic questions and took part in lots of discussion. We looked at Jewish symbols and some of us even tried Kippahs (Jewish caps) on! 

Spring Term

Our theme this term is 'Ancient Worlds'. Watch this space to see what we get up to! 

Sculptor

Last week we had Neil Wood visit our class, he is an artist and makes sculptures. We learnt how to create our own Ancient Greek tiles, we used clay, plaster of Paris and recycled materials to make our artefacts. We really enjoyed our session, building on our art skills and learning more information about Ancient Greek pottery.

Ancient Greek Workshop

Yesterday, our class had a fantastic time in our Ancient Greek workshop, delivered by Professor Tuesday. We looked at different periods of Ancient Greek times, we discussed the city-states, Athens and Sparta and looked at the differences between them. The session also included some role play, where we acted as different people from Greek times. We were shown lots of artefacts, such as pottery and athletic equipment from the Olympics. We all really enjoyed the session and it wrapped up our topic of Ancient Greece nicely!

Inspirational People

This half term, we are looking at inspirational people, who have had an influence on society. We will be looking at the lives of Leonardo Da Vinci, Alan Turing, Stephen Hawking and Katherine Johnson. 

Last week, in our spring 'plants week', we looked at the life cycle of a potato. We tided up the vegetable patch on Thursday afternoon and planted potato seeds. Hopefully the potatoes will be ready when we come back from the summer break in September.