Active Maths

Year Five had a fantastic start back into summer term. At the beginning of our maths lesson we completed another ‘maths of the day’ activity. It involved the children getting into groups and ‘going shopping’. One at a time, the children had to run and get an amount of money card, repeating this until they had to total the bill. They then had to find how much change they had from £20. This involved adding and subtracting decimals, which have been working on over the last few weeks.

Not only was it great fun, but we wore ourselves out trying to do as many ‘shopping trips’ as possible in 10 minutes.

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Prayer

In RE today, we explored what the premise of prayer was and who we chose to talk to in order to share our worries, thanks or problems. We learnt that, actually, many of the things we shared and why we shared them were similar to prayer. We had a lot of really quality discussion, as well as watching some short videos and looking at some artefacts. Some children shared some really in-depth knowledge and insight into their personal religion and we really enjoyed learning so much!

Y5GE Spring 40 Reads

A massive congratulations to those children who reached 40 reads this term, resulting in either their bronze or silver badge! We are aiming for a full house next term!

Sugar!

This afternoon was our final SUFC Move and Learn session. As well as an exceptionally high-quality outdoor football session (Hayden was blown away with the children’s skills and the gusto in which they threw themselves into the game!) we were fascinated by the facts presented to us during the indoor session.

The focus of the session was hidden sugar in drinks. You would not believe some of the things we found out! Coca Cola was bad, as we expected, with 11.5 cubes of sugar per 330ml can. However, an Oasis squash-like drink was not far behind with 4.5! Ribena was 14.5 cubes of sugar for 500ml! We couldn’t believe it! As someone commented, it isn’t even a fizzy drink and doesn’t taste like sugar. The worst drink of the selection we looked at was a small McDonalds milkshake with 21.5 cubes of sugar! That is 67.5g per 500ml!

The sessions have definitely made the children think, and many of Y5GE have commented on how much they learnt from and enjoyed the sessions when writing their spring reflections.

Halle Orchestra

This morning, we were lucky enough to have the opportunity to listen to the amazingly talented Halle Orchestra. Thank you to Mrs Haque for letting us know about it! Before hand, we had learnt two choruses of songs sung in World War 1:

• It’s a long way to Tipperary; and
• Pack up your troubles

We travelled to the event by bus, there were lots of other children around the city centre but whenever we had to wait we did so really patiently!

The City Hall really is a magnificent venue too and we enjoyed the orchestra, silently listening when it was time and joining in with gusto when we were asked! Miss Eden was really surprised by how many different musical pieces she knew! Her favourite was a piece by Barber, Adagio for Strings. The children seemed to love a song by Williams, Star Wars: Imperial March from the Empire Strikes Back. We each had a scracth and sniff card too – Mars was our favourite!

Funding Cuts

Yesterday, we were so proud to represent Watercliffe Meadow at the protest in the City Centre! As well as walking to the Town Hall and standing on the steps, chanting, some of us were busy handing out the leaflets we had designed and made last Friday.

The winning designs (of which there were many) were extremely informative and the members of the public who received them were really impressed. One person even tweeted about it! Many people stopped and asked what we were doing, when they were handed a leaflet, and congratulated us on all of our efforts for education and its funding. Well done WCM!

Here are the designs that were given out:

Spellings – Homophones

It has been so good sticking our teeth into another week of exciting spellings. This week, the theme is homophones – words with the same sound but a different meaning or spelling. Miss Eden was very impressed when we could come up with so many different homophones, we only stopped because we filled the flipchart page! Here they are:

We found that the key to the spellings, the centre box, is not so much HOW to spell them but knowing the meaning of WHICH word to spell. We now have quite a lot of knowledge of the different definitions.

However, we are finding that the most common errors we are making in our writing (this week, letters written in character) are the most basic homophones. We are now trying really hard to check as we write, so they are on the whiteboard in the classroom:

We tried to give ourselves quick clues so that we could remember which homophone is which. The other most common one that has come out of today’s writing is ‘your’ and ‘you’re’.

you’re = you are (can you replace you are into the sentence?)

You’re going to love what I’ve cooked for dinner.

your = a determiner; belonging to or associated with a person

Are we going to your house after school?

Can you spell them correctly every time you use them?

Move and Learn – Session 2

This afternoon, we had our 2nd session with two representatives from SUFC’s Move and Learn programme. The focus of the indoor session was bones and muscles. The class recapped what we had learnt about bones of the body, that we learnt in gymnastics earlier in the year (although we did not remember as much as we hoped we would!) Tristan, from SUFC, gave us the main sections of bones in the body and we had to try and put them together.

We had great success overall except for muddling up our humerus (bone in our arm) and femur (bone in our leg), we had very long arms and shorter legs!

We also learnt two fun facts about the smallest and largest parts of the human body; the stapes is the smallest human bone and is found in our ear and our largest muscle is the gluteus maximus (our bum!) After the indoor session, we had to begin the outdoor session in our classroom doing a Joe Wicks workout, as it was very wet! Luckily, we managed to get out for most of the session and then the sun came out!

Y5GE World Book Day

Today has been a very busy and exciting day for the Year Fives. Firstly, it was the school’s World Book Day. Here are the children in Y5GE who chose to dress up. It was nice to have some representatives of the classic Roald Dahl books, JK Rowling’s magical characters and many more!

Well done to all of you who made an amazing effort with your costumes!

The London App – the update

The content for our London apps is now finished! We had our critical expert, Catherine Elliott, in on the Wednesday before the half-term holiday. We laid out our iPads to show-off our amazing content and went around the classroom giving warm and cool feedback. Catherine was so impressed with our professional layout and content, she left lots of warm feedback. Here we are in action!

After we had received our feedback we made a list of what things we would have included if the iPods we’re putting the content onto had 4G. Here is our list: