Dear Parents and Carers,

Friday brings to an end another busy week at SCPS, and there have been a variety of new and interesting activities happening.

Our week began with a performance of the Shakespeare play ‘Hamlet,’ full of the usual Shakespearean twists, turns and tragedies, and a great way to gain insight into the literature of a well-known writer before we engaged with our World Book Day activities on Thursday.

World Book Day presented the children with a range of new ideas. Firstly, the children took part in a reading carousel, where they chose two different classrooms in which they could hear different types of text being read to them. After break, they had a go at designing a book cover for a novel they have enjoyed or a story of their own, and spent the afternoon discussing and drawing their own perfect reading space. There was still time for the usual reading of their own books, and the children were also given a £1 book token – details on the reverse of the voucher.

There has also been a hive of activity in our usual classroom lessons this week. In Literacy, we practised using speech marks, as well as the punctuation within them, correctly, and also learnt about the differences between active and passive sentences before having a go at writing some of our own. Next week, we will be planning and writing up a sequel to the Jeremy Strong tale mentioned in last week’s post, this time focusing on writing the story from Ramona’s perspective rather than the main character in the original, Luke.

Maths has seen us move onto finding fractions of amounts and how to show our working out. The children are beginning to understand the importance of finding one half, one third or one quarter of an amount to start with, and then using their times tables to find larger fractions of the same amount, such as two thirds or three quarters. We will continue this next week before discovering how to use fractions to find the missing whole number in a sum, after which we will revise how we use fractions in adding, subtracting and multiplying.

In the afternoons, our Mayans topic is now well underway, and the children enjoyed learning about the various Mayan Gods and Goddesses and their features. In PE, we worked on our passing and moving skills in netball- a crucial skill in a sport where a player cannot move when they have the ball – and we tried out some attack v defence overloads (where one side has at least one extra player) in basketball. Our final activity of the week came in PSHE, where the children learnt about the differences between borrowing and loaning money – and the potential pitfalls of both – as we continued our unit on economic well-being.

Before we finish, a gentle reminder that next Wednesday will be the final swimming session for class 5TA. For this, the children will need their usual swimming kit as well as their pyjamas.

Enjoy your weekend,

The Y5 Team