Dear Parents and Carers,

As promised, ‘Street Child’ reached its emotional conclusion this week. Shrimps did not recover from his ill health – he had simply been starving for too long -and Jim was yet again lost in the world, wondering why nobody around him either could nor wanted to provide help. Jim then entered his final adventure of the story, presenting himself at the ‘Ragged School,’ run by a man named ‘Barnie’ (Dr Barnardo, founder of the Barnardo’s charity shops) a man with whom Jim could finally settle and share his plight. He took Barnie on a tour of the local area, finding freezing children aplenty sleeping on rooves and in doorways. This was the starting point for Dr Barnardo increasing the number of schools for such destitute children and the idea of a future children’s charity was born. Jim may not have succeeded in finding his sisters, but he at last had a safe haven to call home. The children were fascinated to find that Jim Jarvis was a real boy and the true inspiration for the rise of Dr Barnardo’s work, as well as learning that characters such as Shrimps and Grimy Nick were also based on similar characters from Jim’s real story. Next week, we will take on a SPaG focus, with the children learning how to incorporate relative clauses and parenthesis in their writing.

In Maths, the children have been practising their adding and multiplication skills, applying these to changing the denominator to support adding fractions within 1 and greater than 1, with some children moving onto subtracting fractions and adding mixed numbers. There will be some more work on this next week as we look to consolidate these skills before moving forward in January.

We have also been wrapping a few topics up in the afternoons. In DT, our cam toys have now been completed, tested and evaluated successfully. Our PSHE discussion this week focused on respecting others as well as ourselves, and we spent an interesting Topic lesson learning about Victorian workhouses in more brutal, horrifying detail – another lesson about the past that has made the children feel a strong sense of gratitude for the lives they lead today.

Reminders for next week:

Monday 16th December: Year 5 and 6 trip to MECE to watch Christmas show (10am-12.30pm, leaving school at around 9.30am). The children still need to come to school in their PE kits as usual, and need to bring a water bottle and snack as there is a break halfway through the performance. If you have a current DBS check with the school and are able to help us walk the children to MECE and back, that would be hugely appreciated.

Thursday 19th December: Our annual Christmas Carol Concert, under the shelter by the KS1 playground, starts at 6pm.

Friday 20th December: School ends at 1.15pm.

Have a great weekend,

The Y5 Team