We’ve had a busy and productive week in Year Five.

Maths this week has moved on to decimals and will tackle percentages too.  Obviously the topic is perfectly linked to very real-life examples – especially around money (tenths and hundredths) and time (sometimes shown in thousandths – e.g. F1 lap times).  It is important that children can recognise and work out the equivalence of common fractions to decimals, and that they can add and subtract decimals.  Later on we move on to ordering decimal numbers and rounding them.  Again, there are plenty of practical applications of these for you to discuss with your child – ‘a couple of quid’, ‘about 50p’ and so on.

In Literacy we worked on part of a story by Jeremy Strong, called This is NOT a Fairytale.  It is a hilarious (to the adults at least) tale of an ordinary boy called Luke who has to overcome all sorts of problems in trying to rescue an ungrateful Princess Ramona from a castle on a mountain.  In addition to circumventing the Waggletooth Witch, the Black Bear, a patch of brambles the size of Europe, and a bunch of trolls, he also has to work out how to defeat the ‘Giant Man-Eating Unicorn That Nobody Had Ever Seen.’  

Guess what?

He didn’t see it.

Side-splitting stuff.

Your children wrote some excellent descriptions of Luke and Ramona, and then had to justify why they preferred which character.  They also did some comparative analysis on the starting paragraphs of different Jeremy Strong stories, to try to identify his style of writing and whether there are common techniques he uses.  We are trying (in addition to all the technical SPaG requirements) to get them to write stylishly and to develop their own approaches.

We played tennis in the rain this afternoon, and did some work in PSHE on possible future careers, and how their current skills and interests might push them in particular directions.

Wednesday saw the children making Top Trumps cards, each representing the various strength, speed, beauty, kindness and ruthlessness scores of twelve Greek gods.  They did this very well, and enjoyed playing TT with their sets of cards afterwards.

Computing this week was the final cryptography session.  Next week they will start putting together websites to tie in with Safer Internet Day.

A couple of important things to note please:

Maidenhead Mosque Trip

This is a superb educational experience for your children and will take place on Tuesday 27th February, leaving school promptly at 9.00am.

Please note that we are intending to be back by 12.30pm but occasionally there are traffic delays.  To be sure your child has a decent lunch, it would be better if you could supply them with a packed lunch that day.  If your child would like a school packed lunch, please inform the office as soon as possible.

Swimming

As previously advertised, Dr Loader’s class will be swimming on Wednesdays 21st and 28th February, and 6th March.  Mr Andrews’s class will be swimming on 13th, 20th and 27th March.  Please ensure your child brings swimming kit on those Wednesdays.

Best wishes for a fantastic weekend – see you Monday.

The Y5 Team