Dear Parents/Carers,

We hope the children have been enjoying their extra day off this week – they have been working hard all week and have certainly earned it!

We spent the week working towards producing a description of a setting in Literacy. The children were shown a picture of a bright, colourful house in the middle of an enchanting wood that was bathing under a burst of sunlight. From here, the children not only honed their abilities to create expanded noun phrases, but also began experimenting with figurative language – especially focusing on using similes, personification, alliteration and hyperbole to bring their ideas to the page. The end result has been a variety of vivid setting descriptions which we have enjoyed reading. Next week, we move onto poetry – reinforcing our knowledge of figurative language before learning about various types of poetry, such as acrostic and shape poems.

Maths saw us reach the conclusion of our unit on place value. The children began the week comparing and ordering numbers up to 1,000,000 before extending their rounding skills to include rounding to the nearest 10,000 and 100,000. We finished the week with a lesson on Roman Numerals, with the children keen to match the numbers to the correct letters and then using these to solve problems. Next week, we will move on to addition and subtraction, starting with practising some mental strategies before working on using the column methods for larger (4-digit or more) numbers.

We are also progressing nicely with our afternoon lessons. In Topic, we looked at some photographs of Australian artefacts – such as a boomerang, lil lil, bullroarers and a coolamon – and discussed how these were made, what they were used for and whether or not they served another purpose. The children also studied the artistic patterns and drawings on some of these items and thought about the decisions behind these.

In Art, they experimented with their own viewfinders – a piece of A4 paper with a small rectangle cut out of it – and practised making decisions with their own artwork, moving the viewfinder across a bigger picture to help them focus on the section that they wanted to draw.

Elsewhere, the children have been further developing their dance skills in PE, with an emphasis on the styles that were popular in the 1960s. Many notable performances – to the tune of ‘Let’s Twist Again’ by Chubby Checker and ‘The Swim’ by Bobby Freeman – both individually and as a dance group, were on show.

Outside the classroom, the weather has caused it to be a frustrating week when it comes to providing outdoor clubs, and we aim to be able to run these more consistently with an upturn in the weather (hopefully) over the next few weeks. Thanks for your patience with this.

As a quick reminder, the Sonning Common 10K Run is on Sunday 6th October. More details can be found in this week’s newsletter.

Have a great weekend,

The Y5 Team