Dear Parents and Carers,

Thank you all for our lovely cards and gifts before the break, and welcome back to a new term. We hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and are feeling positive about the year ahead!

Literacy resumed with our new unit on instruction writing. The children have studied different modal verbs – and were glad to see that they used most of these in their regular writing – and also had a go at writing their own instructions before working on the structure of introductions and conclusions when writing instructional texts. Next week, we will look at prepositions, before writing our own pieces about making our own Greek flatbreads. We hope to make these next Friday, so if you could send in any mixing bowls, rolling pins or wooden spoons, that would be very helpful – we promise they will come back cleaned – and the children are invited to bring in a small tub of a dip of their choice, as long as it is nut free and suitable to their dietary requirements.

In Maths we finished our work on subtracting fractions and mixed numbers, and moved onto multiplying 4-digit by 1-digit and 2-digit by 2-digit numbers, refreshing our use of the grid method and learning about the column method. More work on this will be done next week, and we will also look to apply these skills to solving word problems and short division sums.

The children were also excited to begin studying the Ancient Greeks as part of our new topic. We located Greece on a map, briefly discussed the empire of Alexander the Great and composed our own timelines of important events during this era.

New topics were also found in Science, where the children have been learning about the different forces at play in the world around them, and we have completed our house designs for the ‘We Are Architects’ unit in Computing.

A couple of dates for the diary:

Monday 20th January, 7.30pm: PTA AGM in the school hall. A chance to share your views on all things SCPS, as well as an opportunity to meet our headteacher Mrs Salmons – as well as various members of the Senior Leadership Team and the Governing Body – and hear about her vision for the school.

Friday 24th January: Year 5 have their Ancient Greek Day in the school hall, and we would like some parent helpers to help run a few stalls in the morning. If a few could also stay for the afternoon, that would be much appreciated. Please let Mrs Honor in the office know if you can help.

Have a good weekend,

The Y5 Team