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Term 1

This term, Chinese Pandas have worked very hard and made a great start to Year 5. Our topic of ‘Dynamic Dynasties’ has focused on the civilisations of Ancient China.

English

 In English, we have focused on writing our own time-travel stories. With our tales starting off by describing the experience of wandering around in a grand art gallery (a task the children have achieved using some excellent expanded noun phrases), these narratives involve our main characters touching a mysterious artefact and being whisked off to ancient China. Within this piece of writing, the children will be using modal verbs, punctuated direct speech and a whole lot of imagination.

Maths

 This term, we have been looking at the place value of digits within a number (up to 5 digits) and rounding numbers to the nearest 10, 100, 1,000, 10,000 and 100,000. We’ve also been expanding on our knowledge of addition and subtraction and will shortly be moving on to the challenging area of ‘multi-step’ problems.

Art

 Our art lessons started with ‘Tints, Tones and Shades’, which involved us exploring how mixing a colour with either black, white or grey will achieve a new version of that colour (either a tint, tone or shade). After practising this skill, we took an existing painting (done by a famous artist) and replicated the colours they’d used (by mixing our own watercolours). We then looked at more landscapes and learnt about the horizon line, focal points and perspective lines. The next step in our creative process involved sketching out some landscape scenes in our books, in which we concentrated on creating depth with our lines. Finally, we used our knowledge of colour mixing and tints, tones and shades to paint our landscape and further suggest depth in our composition.

P.E.

 We have been concentrating on two very different areas of physical education this term. Out on the field, we’ve been learning the skills required to play tag rugby and, in the school’s gymnasium, we’ve been creating balances and counter-balances on some of the gymnastics equipment. As you would imagine, the rugby has been slightly less refined than the gymnastics, but the children are putting considerable effort into each task that’s thrown at them.

Music

 Nobody had played a glockenspiel before we started in Term 1, but the class is now full of experts. We have been listening to pieces of music that have 4 beats in a bar and then following written prompts which instruct us when to hit the notes on our instruments. Mr Beattie has been incredibly surprised by our musical ability!