Dear Parents/Carers,

Welcome back to another school year – we hope you and your children have had a wonderful summer. The children have returned refreshed and eager to get started in their new classrooms.

The summer break was the focus of our Literacy lessons this week. We discussed a variety of adventures, from journeys to various destinations around the world as well as the joys of relaxing at home. Once these recollections were shared, the children showed off their descriptive vocabulary, adding some analogies of the sights they had seen and the positive emotions of the last six weeks.

Maths began with the topic of Place Value. Both Maths sets have been refreshing and building upon their knowledge of numbers to 10,000 and 100,000 and thinking about where such numbers may appear in real life. Ideas included knowing the number of people living in a town, a building company needing to know how many houses could be built upon a plot of land or attendance figures for sporting events and concerts.

Numbers similar to those above can be found in the distance (in miles) between ourselves and Australia, the country we will focus on in our Topic lessons this term. The first lesson saw us identifying the states of Australia on a map before adding various towns and cities across the nation such as Perth, Brisbane and Adelaide. The Optional Homework tasks based on Australia have been sent to you by email and hopefully your children have brought a paper copy home – please let us know if you have not received them as we have plenty of spare copies.

Our first visitors of the year were from the Dogs Trust. This was a very informative session, where the children learnt how to interpret the moods and feelings of dogs by looking carefully at their body language. Not many of us (adults included) realised that dogs don’t like to be hugged, but all were able to sympathise with the idea of not being poked and prodded whilst trying to eat or sleep.

The week ended with a chance to show off their sporting skills in our first PE lesson of the year – passing and dribbling in hockey – as well as performing in a role play of a courtroom scenario in PSHE, where the children took on various roles including that of lawyers, judges, the jury and the accused, and were able to present some rather interesting verbal ‘evidence’ to try and influence the thoughts of those on the jury.

To finish, it was great to see so many of you at the Curriculum Sharing yesterday evening – thank you for attending. For those who couldn’t join, the presentation has been uploaded to the school website. Just let us know if you can’t find it.

Next week, we begin our Literacy work on Dreamtime Stories – Australian tales from long ago – where we will look to build their comprehension skills and focus on expanded noun phrases in their written work. The children will also be reminded that the usual TTRS and Spelling Shed homework will be set for the first time in Year 5 from next Thursday (12th September), meaning that there is no homework set for this week.

Overall, a really good start to the year.

Enjoy your weekend,

The Y5 Team