Dear Parents and Carers,

Another busy week in Literacy has seen us reach the end of our unit on Greek myths. Our alternative endings for the classic tale Prometheus and Pandora are now complete, with the children showing a good understanding of the content required as well as including a nice range of figurative language. We spent the rest of the week learning about the differences between antonyms and synonyms, and also learnt how to turn simple sentences into compound sentences by adding conjunctions such as ‘but’ or ‘because.’ Next week there will be some reading comprehension practise when we study a myth from another culture before moving on to use our skimming and scanning skills to find information in a non-fiction text.

In Maths, we have reached the end of our unit on area and perimeter. We used our multiplication skills to find the area of a rectangle before discovering how to separate a compound shape to enable us to find the area. There was also a brief session on estimating the area of a shape or picture, an especially useful skill if you do not have squares on the inside to count nor any measurements to help you. From Monday, we will turn our focus towards statistics and the ways in which they can be presented – such as in line graphs, information tables and timetables – before discussing how these are used in the world beyond school.

The afternoons have seen their usual share of entertainment. On Wednesday we spent an hour with two A-Level English teachers from Highdown secondary school,  who came and ran a session about creative writing and writing from the perspective of someone (or in this case, something else), where the children had to write a short piece in the role of a street dog. In Computing, we returned to ‘The Black Chamber’ to develop our cipher code-cracking skills, and there was an enjoyable lesson centred around the various Greek Gods and Goddesses in Topic.

The week ended with us having a go at the Interhouse Challenge for this term. The task was to name as many countries as they could from memory in a given amount of time. Winners will be announced in the newsletter next week.

To finish, a big well done to those involved in the Sportshall Athletics this week – a top performance and a fantastic result – as well as those who played in the Y5/6 County Finals for the boys’ football team, who, after spending the morning playing football in Oxford, returned to school as Oxfordshire County Champions!

Have a great weekend,

The Y5 Team