Dear Parents and Carers,

We spent this morning creating our eagerly awaited Mayan masks. So far, so good for both the children and their mask models – we will be decorating these with paint next week to conclude our work on the Mayan civilisation.

Elsewhere, the classes picked several topics to debate in Literacy and were then split into small groups to organise their opinions into a short script for their debate with an opposing team. Those who had watched in the audience as the debates unfolded then offered reasons for why they thought one side was more convincing than the other, showing a nice grasp of things such as formal language and the presenting of valid reasons. From here, we wrote up our notes into sentences and paragraphs to create a persuasive text of our own. Next week, we will aim to finish the term by covering several aspects of SPaG such as relative clauses, shorter and longer sentences, and the correct use of an ellipsis.

Maths has seen us continue to work with angles. The children have practised drawing and estimating the size of angles as well as measuring angles with a protractor. We have also thought about the useful information when it comes to finding angles on a straight line (‘we know angles on a straight line add to 180 degrees – how can this help us?’) and uncovering the missing angles around a point (‘we know angles around a point add up to 360 degrees – how can this help us?’). Next week we will look at the lengths and angles of shapes before learning about regular and irregular polygons. There will also be a first look at coordinates and how we would use these in the real world.

The afternoons threw up some interesting new experiences, both this week and in terms of the future. We were visited by the Jump Rope Co on Thursday, who gave us the chance to exhibit and enhance our skipping skills, and there is much enthusiasm for the upcoming French fashion show which is due to take place next Tuesday afternoon. It seems that there are some excellent catwalk-style strides and poses thoroughly deserving of a wider school audience.

In terms of the usual afternoon lessons, the children have had a go at ‘changing faces’ in Art, getting creative with a photograph using the mixed media of pastels, pencils and pens. They have also experienced some further practise of operating the hand chimes in Music.

Reminders for next week:

• Today was the final Forest Camp session for class 5TA. On Friday next week, the first group of children from class 5RF/JM will attend.
• This week, the children are not expected to complete the usual TTRS or Spelling Shed homework. Instead, we would like them to research a topic they are interested in (appropriate for a primary school audience) and be able to talk about this subject for one minute. This is to help them prepare for the Interhouse Challenge this term. An email was sent about this earlier in the week – please let us know if you did not receive it.

Have a wonderful weekend,

The Y5 Team