This House Believes that all 10-year-olds should bring a mobile phone to school.

This House Believes that SATs should be scrapped.

This House Believes that it would be good to be famous.

These were our three debating topics (spread across the two classes) yesterday.  There was a fair bit of preparation during the week, including some discussion and note-taking on the topics themselves, some teaching of persuasive techniques in letters and texts, and discussion about formal and informal language that might be used.  On the morning itself, we gave the children some suggestions of the language they could use whilst debating:

• Whilst I accept your excellent point, I would like to suggest…
• Mr Smith, quite frankly your suggestion is preposterous…
• In my considered opinion…
• and many more.

Whilst role-play and ‘speaking posh’ was good fun, the carefully-prepared arguments and the to and fro discussions were just brilliant.  Setting up something like this is the sort of thing that is very open-ended – it was difficult to predict how long it would last.   Would they run out of steam after a few minutes?   Not at all!  Lunch was the cutoff point, after nearly two hours of heated debate and discussion!  Everyone had to use last names, including gems such as, ‘Well I’m very sorry, but I have to disagree with both Miss Wells and Mr Telford!’ and stand up when they were speaking.  For each motion, two children made a short statement as the proposers, and two represented the opposition side – thanks to them for preparing their speeches and being brave enough to present them.

We have not done this before, but would do it again.  Mr Andrews and I commented that you need vibrant and cohesive groups to make this work.  We certainly have that and we thank them for it.

Maths this week was a little more down to earth.  Mostly to do with angles in shapes, using a protractor, and calculating missing values.  These are things that are always good to practise at home.  For example, this section of the Maths Made Clear ‘Maths at Home’ video might help.

On Wednesday we looked at the kinds of foods that made up the Mayan diet.  Up to 80% of the diet was maize, in various forms, supplemented by beans, avocado, squashes, and some meat.  The Mayans also made the most of the pods and fruit of the cacao tree in an early version of chocolate.  Many of these foods still form a key part of the diet in Central America (Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras).  To that end we all tasted some maize tortillas, some refried beans, and some chilli-laced chocolate.  Absolutely everyone who could did, and it perhaps gave them a taste for what the diet would have been like.

We finally got outside on Friday for some athletics practice.  Being England, it was almost too hot for too much running (having been too cold, too wet, or too miserable for most of the winter).  But of course, we can make the most of our wonderful grounds now – we had some visitors from Inner London last week who could not believe the space we have.

It was wonderful to see so many Year Five children at cricket on Thursday.  Due to a triple booking and some confusion (and at least one very grumpy face), there was no room for the cricket (We need more space!), but it actually turned out well for the first session – we did some proper training drills (batting, bowling and catching) in the MUGA – another fantastic resource denied to smaller schools.  The big advantage?   There is a high fence, so no lost cricket balls.  We will be on the grass from now on.

Science has moved on to studying different materials – we may do one or two two-hour slots for these topics as they require significant setup time.  In return children will do some double Computing sessions later on.  Computing has moved on to a Scratch module called ‘We are Game Developers’.

Finally many thanks to the families who supported WTB last Saturday – another great example of the spirit and energy within Year Five.

Have a lovely weekend in the sunshine…more rain on Monday!

Y5 Team