A good week in Year Five, but…

…we turned our attention a bit to Year Six this afternoon.

It was a PSHE session on transition, looking at hopes and worries for next year, and some discussion of roles and responsibilities when you are at the top end of the school.  Your children are looking forward to Woodlands, for sure, but also to getting their Y1 buddies, and being allowed to sit on the benches in assembly.  Minor worries included talk of SATs (although we were confident in reassuring them that they will be well prepared by then), and who their next teacher(s) and classmates might be.  They will find out this last bit of information on July 23rd.

Maths this week has focused on decimals and negative numbers, with a short session also on conversion.  This latter topic really links in with lots of the early work on place value, because if you are converting between kilometres and metres, or metres and centimetres or millimetres, you need those key skills of dividing and multiplying by 10, 100 and 1000 which we practise so often.  And not just for distance measures – we will be looking at volume (capacity in litres and millilitres) and weight (kg and g).

Our Big Write this morning was something we haven’t done before – an analysis of various song lyrics.  We asked the children to try to work out the meaning of three songs (different ones per class), and then to choose one to have an in depth look at.  These were not songs that the children knew well (if at all), so it involved some careful listening, careful reading of the lyrics, and then some in-depth analysis – focusing on implicit and explicit language, metaphors and similes, Show not Tell, and emotive imagery.

The songs we looked at included That’s just the way it is, Eleanor Rigby, Graceland, Positively 4th Street, and Talkin’ ’bout a Revolution.  Each one of them a top song from a legendary songwriter.  Poetry if you like, but some very serious messages underneath the hits.  This was a great way to spend the morning and built nicely on our creative writing earlier in the week.  The outputs are a series of A3 annotated sheets with sentences and pictures representing the interpretation of the words.

In Computing this week the children were challenged with creating a leaderboard for their game.  This involves setting up a new variable in the form of a list, to hold the names and scores, and then to ensure it was properly displayed and incremented as planned.  Good practice.

PE this evening was cricket.  It is great to see the children just organise themselves for this where necessary, and to see everyone getting stuck in.

Onwards and upwards to Week 5 (of 7 and a bit).

Y5 Team.