I can hardly believe we’ve been in school for four weeks already! It has been lovely and the children are all working hard and showing what good learners they all are. They’ve been collecting points for their great behaviour and hard work, both at home and at school, and Miss Evans and I continue to be impressed. Please do ask your child how many points they have managed to obtain this week, and in future weeks, to encourage them to strive for more.
As mentioned, points are also awarded for completion of their weekly homework and for their daily reading and getting their diaries signed, and I thank you for your support in this. All diaries are checked daily, regardless of whether they have read or not and reading bookmarks are updated at this time. Please ensure your child has their diary and reading book in school everyday - most children do but there are a small number of Year 5 who are missing out on collecting their points for reading because their diary is not in school every day.
Thank you also for your support in online homework over the last few weeks, I’ve been impressed with the scores I’ve seen so far and I’ve already noticed the children using vocabulary learnt through Bedrock. Most children have successfully completed all their weekly homework but there are a small number of children who have yet to complete some of the activities on Bedrock and Education City. Now the children are in Upper KS2, it’s really important that they are learning to organise their time to complete their homework in preparation for Year 6 and for High School. Please see the Year 5 homework page for details of this week’s homework. last
If there are problems accessing the home learning then please let me know as soon as possible by emailing me at year5@our-lady.blackpool.sch.uk so I can support where needed. With infection rates rising and more restrictions being put in place, if we were to be put into a position where learning needed to take place at home due to self isolation or lockdown, these sites (amongst others) would be used for home learning. If this were to happen, communication would be established by email. I do have most of your email addresses but I will request your email by text if I haven’t got it. One last thing, as we no longer have face to face contact at the moment, if I need to speak to you regarding your child, I will contact you by email or by phone.
Our Learning this week…
In English the children have been planning their own episode for Ramona’s escape down the mountain using ideas from Jeremy Strong’s own story. The children have had some great ideas and they are already looking forward to writing their own episode next week.
In Maths we have been looking at place value in numbers with two decimal places and have had a go at writing our own “Which decimal am I?” cards for others to solve using the clues written by the children. They’ve also been multiplying and dividing numbers with up to two decimal places by 10 and 100.
This week in our Space topic, the children have been looking at how the rotation of the Earth allows us to have day and night. Ask your child to explain it to you, to see how much they’ve remembered.
In RE the children have discussed the Scientific view of how the World began and also listened to the Creation story from Genesis 1 (Theological view) and have made their own Creation wheel as a reminder of the story.
We had a really successful Computing lesson this week where the children learnt all about Binary coding that computers use to communicate with each other. The children found out that the Curiosity Mars Rover communicated back and forth with Nasa using this code. They have learnt how to read binary up to eight characters and understand that each one or zero is referred to as a bit. They then played a game on the computer where they needed to calculate binary numbers, knowing each digit is worth double the one that precedes it. It’s quite a challenging concept so I was really impressed with how quickly they understood this and they managed some really high scores.
In Bounce Forward this week, we discussed tough times that people go through and the resilient things we can do to help us get through them. Some of the children chose to share their own personal stories and I really was impressed with their openess and honesty. We talked about how important it is to talk to someone we trust and share how we feel when we’re going through a tough time, as a problem shared is a problem halved.
Our award winners:
Golden Award - Declan
Writing Award -Brodie
Maths Award - Olivia
Year 5 Star Winner - Molly
Another great week Year 5, keep up the great work! We hope you all have a lovely weekend with your families. Keep safe!
Mrs McVey and Miss Evans
