Year 5

The year group enjoyed the first two days settling into their new classes and were undefeated by the Indian Summer that welcomed us back from the holidays. Before the curriculum’s official start this week, classes enjoyed a carousel of activities, spent time getting to know each other and their new (in most cases) teachers and hearing about the expectations and routines for the year ahead. Maths started by revisiting Roman numerals, where the children demonstrated excellent recall and application, before we moved on to a recap of place value. Our English text is Shaun Tan’s The Lost Thing, which provoked intrigue and sympathy amongst the children. The first unit of work will be recapping the features of instructions, as a first step to writing their own care guide for a Lost Thing next week. The year group were able to showcase last year’s learning about Space in our first Science topic of the year. We started off by thinking about what makes a good scientific question and we practised writing interesting questions about Space. Our PE learning started with some fantastic team-building activities. We covered the hall with spots and ran various games, including turning the space into a climbing wall!

Key Messages

• Key vocab: place value,  imperative verbs, population, working scientifically. 

• KIRFs: Can I recall multiplication scaling facts by 10 and 100? 

• Please look out for a message about payment for a visit from the Space Dome

• Homework/reading/spelling to be set week commencing 25th September

Year 6

This week in Year 6 we have started a variety of new topics which all the children have really enjoyed and been engaged with. It has been lovely to see how mature and sensible the year group are - they are definitely ready for the challenges of Year 6 and to be top of the school. In our maths lessons, the cohort has been learning about place value and used many different models: place value charts, part-whole models, bar models and Gattegno charts. We have all been impressed with the mathematical language used when explaining their answers. Way Home has been our inspirational text in English. We have been submerging ourselves in the bright city lights of New York. During their writing, the children have described their character walking through a city using similar writing techniques to those of Libby Hathorn, the author of Way Home.Science has been a real favourite this week - we have been looking at different living things and their adaptations to their environments. The children have been using a variety of their scientific skills to identify what characteristics support an animal in their biome.

Key Messages:

• Homework/reading/spelling to be set week commencing 25th September.

• Meet the teacher - Monday 18th September at 2:45pm 

• PJ reading day - Friday 22nd September 

• Spelling rules: Year 3/4 Statutory words 

• Key vocab: Heath, Silhouette, Flora, biome, place value 

• KIRFs: Can I identify all prime numbers to 100?