In science today we were observing to see if different solids, such as wood shavings, flour and sugar, would dissolve in water. 
We all agreed to use the same amount cold water. We also agreed to do the same number of stirs and use the same amounts of solids. We were shocked to find that the salt did not dissolve but were able to think of reasons why it had not done so. 
Well done to all of the children who have passed their handwriting this week!
We have started a new scheme as Mr Read is even stricter than ever in passing children to get their handwriting pen. We have had 11 passes so far and I’m certain there are lots more to come! 
Despite it being the last full week of school and the same week as the carnival and other exciting activities, we still found the time to do some really high quality writing. Based around given images we generated adjectives, adverbs, verbs and a range of feelings. These were then used to generate and ‘free write’ a description of the images. The content of all the writing was amazing, and the children worked hard in Y5GE to include the given sentence. Mrs Dwyer and I were very impressed! Below are two of the amazing pieces of writing.
We had a new and interesting experience in school today. Two people were in the hall all day, assessing each class against their diving skills! Odd, you might think, especially as we were in the hall with no water! However, the children demonstrated a number of skills (many of which we had learnt and applied in our gymnastic sessions) from walking on tip toes with good posture to forward rolls. Everyone received a free diving session voucher, a certificate and a letter explaining the details. Some were even invited to come and complete the phase 2 testing because they were so good!
Here some of us are in action:
Our final block of maths for the year is volume. This involves the children understanding what volume is (the space that a 3D shape takes up) and how we can calculate it. We learnt that to calculate the volume of a cube or cuboid you need to multiply the length by the width and by the height (L x W x H).
Before we applied this process to a range of volume questions, of differing levels of difficulty, we used 1cm cubes to explore volume physically. Here we are achieving just that. We were seeing how many different cuboids we could make with a volume of 8cm cubed.
Last Thursday, we were so lucky with the weather! We had a fantastic afternoon competing in all of the races for sports day – we were quite exhausted when it had finished! Yesterday, the 1st, 2nd and 3rd place winners received their medals and we were all really supportive of each other’s achievements.
Here are a few photos of us in action:
It was definitely a fun afternoon for the year fives! In there weekly science lesson, following the label of their sun, Earth and moon diagrams, the children worked in groups to dissect the flowers of a lily and then label them. The lesson was really interactive and enabled them to find the different sections of a flower. The learning linked to the upcoming work on life-cycles and today it was the life-cycle of a flowering plant.
The children tried to remember the names of the different parts of the flowers that we learned back in Y3 (this was really tricky). They then used the diagram that we had labelled to help us explore and dissect a flower. It was interesting to see all the parts that are usually hidden away within the flower.
In Y5GE, we work really hard with our spellings. We take great care to learn and apply the rules, explore any other words that have the same pattern and are always eager to spot the spelling words or spelling rules of the week in other writing or books.
Today, Miss Eden found a fun game for the children to play to practise their understanding of silent letters. There were three silent letter shooters and the children had to choose the correct letter that was silent in the flying word and shoot it down. Due to time, not everyone got to have a go – but here is the website in case you want to play at home:
If the link doesn’t work, Google ‘silent letter game BBC invaders’.
Here is Katy in action:
Last week, we began learning about Ancient Baghdad as link to our art learning about the early Islamic civilisation. The text type we are working towards writing is a travel advert about why we should visit there. This is a really hard piece of writing to complete due to the fact that it requires us writing about completely new knowledge, writing as a non-chronological report as well as using persuasive features – tricky!
Over the least two days, as a part of our writing lessons we have used gallery critique in order to help our understanding. Gallery critique is where examples of learning are given and children use warm and cool feedback, related to the rubric. We worked hard on making sure our feedback is kind, specific and helpful.
On Monday, we used it to look at four children’s introductory paragraphs – with a focus of modal verbs and adverbs for degrees of possibility. On Tuesday, we used Miss Eden’s WAGOLLs based around the information we would be writing about. Not only did it develop our critiquing skills, but it also enabled us to edit and improve our own writing (using the ideas) and gain new knowledge about Ancient Baghdad.
Here are some of the examples from Monday:
The children had an absolutely fabulous time over the last two days. Here is a small selection of some more photos. There will be more to come next week!
