Dear Parents and Carers,

Welcome back. We hope you all had a restful and enjoyable Easter holiday.

Our new Literacy unit is all about non-chronological reports. This week we have studied their features and the children have learnt some new terms such as ‘formal language’ and ‘present tense verbs.’ They have also used their skimming and scanning skills to find information from such a report. Next week, the children will learn how to gather and organise information with a view to writing their own report, and there will also be some revision of bullet points and semi-colons.

The children have also made an encouraging return to their Maths lessons. We have been working on our rounding skills – specifically when rounding decimals to whole numbers and numbers with 1 decimal place – and have shown a good understanding of percentages when finding an amount from the number 100. Next week, we will be comparing percentages to decimals and fractions before beginning our learning on angles and degrees.

As usual, the afternoons have been full of a wide range of activities. The children have begun a new Science unit, ‘Properties and Changes of Materials,’ and embraced the challenge of decoding the Mayan number system in Topic. In Computing, we have commenced a new unit on blogging and had a go at writing a short blog about something we are interested in (‘How to be Cool’ and ‘Why I Can’t Think of Anything to Write’ being the standout pieces so far), and both classes have created some speedy but strangely ingenious portraits of each other which they outlined with a poem in Art.

As a final note this week, we are not expecting the children to complete a TTRS or Spelling Shed task for their homework. The only homework we would like the children to complete (as well as their usual reading) is their animal research task, which we hope to see in school on Tuesday. Hopefully your children brought a sheet of instructions home and/or you received the email sent from school with the details. If not, then please let us know and we will share the details with you. To confirm, we would like to see their animal research on Tuesday and their planners on Thursday of next week. Thanks for your support with this.

Have a good weekend,

The Y5 Team