Dear Parents and Carers,

We hope you are all well and excited for the approaching festivities. It has been another busy week in Year 5:

Maths has seen the children take on, and respond well to, the challenge of using – mainly through converting from and to – improper fractions and mixed numbers. They have begun to understand how to use shaded bar models, as well as the numbers in a mixed number and their times tables skills to help them. They have also been very good at comparing fractions that are less than 1.  Next week, we move on to compare and order fractions greater than 1, along with some adding and subtracting of fractions.

Literacy has taken us on another rollercoaster ride through the life of Jim Jarvis. His initial delight upon finding an older friend of his mother, Rosie Trilling, is soon extinguished when her grandfather sells him to the detestable Grimy Nick, whose first tasks for Jim involve shovelling coal onto his boat and getting bitten by his guard dog Snipe. As Jim travels around with Nick, he meets a kindly man in Josh, who he begs to take him away from this life on a working boat. Josh is unable to, and poor Jim is left behind to suffer more at the hands of his master. The children have summed up Jim’s life on the boat in a variety of ways, such as through role plays, story mapping and writing as a Victorian child at work. Next week the children will develop their range of emotional adjectives and phrases,  and practise using speech marks and the punctuation within them correctly as we eagerly await the next chapters of Jim’s story.

Our Literacy lessons fed nicely into our Topic session this week, where we looked at the variety of job roles children could be forced into during the Victorian times.  The children learnt about the terrible conditions, the horrific injuries and the all round terror at being forced to an adult’s labour before they had reached, in some cases, seven or eight years old.

As usual, the afternoons have been packed with new knowledge. In Science the children have learnt about the different life cycles across the animal kingdom, they have worked on their fitness through circuit training and football in PE, and have completed the first stage of making their cam toys in DT – thanks again for all the cardboard!

This afternoon also saw the first forest camp session for half of the children in 5TA, with the other half going next week. 5RF/JM will go Friday 13th December and Friday 10th January – details of which children will attend on which date will be sent out in due course.

Last of all, some of you may have realised that the school has recently started making a real push with marketing itself on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter/X by using these sites to help you keep up with all the fun and exciting things we get up to here at SCPS. In order to spread the word, we would really appreciate it if you could follow us on these platforms if you don’t already, and like and share our posts. Thanks to those who already do this, and thank you in advance to those who do after reading this.

Have a great weekend,

The Y5 Team