Autumn Term 1

Well, what a lovely six and a half weeks it has been! I have so enjoyed getting to know all the children. I will admit to getting lots of names muddled up; it's likely to continue for the rest of the year. The children have been very patient with me so far though! Behaviour has been excellent, and the whole class has been keen to show me what they can do.

After working on online safety for the first week- ask one of the class to come up with a password for you, I guarantee it will be un-guessable! We set to work trying to decide whether we thought Henry VIII was a lover or a tyrant. Most of us decided he was both and the class made some super talking portraits explaining why Henry felt the need to divorce or decapitate a number of his brides. I can't seem to upload any on here at the moment, but I will do my best to upload them on to a private YouTube link which I can share with you at a later date.

We then went on to study the art of Chris Ofili. We enjoyed discussing the way in which his work is layered with different materials on top of paints. We took some inspiration from Hans Holbein and had a go at creating some portraits of Henry VIII. When we looked back at our work, we decided that on reflection, some of us may have got a little excited with the glitter. I think Mr O'Connor agreed! 

We spent our final week finding out about Martin Luther King Jr. and the impact he had on the civil rights movement. The children enjoyed finding out about life in the 1950's and 60's and thought deeply about the implications of living in a world where you don't have access to the democratic process. Well mostly, we did have quite a lot of fun listening to songs from the 1960's on Spotify too!

We have now finished reading Skellig which has opened the doors to wide and varied discussion within the class. We have talked about evolution, Rasputin, subtext, platonic friendship, hope, kindness and hundreds of things in between. I am always a little sad when we finish reading a book we have loved but it is short lived as we will dive in to another fictional world after the break.

We finished writing our stories last week and we enjoyed learning how to critically assess and edit our work. Well done to Eulalie who was very brave and shared her work with the whole class. Well done to the rest of the class who were respectful and helpful with their comments. We thought deeply about our feedback and will continue to work on our presentation.

We have almost concluded our work on addition and subtraction and will be moving on to multiplication and division in due course. Our maths fluency work has shown vast improvement and goes to show that practise makes perfect!

The next half term is one of my favourites. I love learning the Christmas songs with the children and seeing them perform fills me with such pride. On the more academic side of things, we will be covering some exciting topics. We continue from our work on Martin Luther King Jr. by writing our own speech. We will also be studying forces and space in the afternoons. I am really excited that the planetarium is coming in to school again, and I'm sure that there will be lots to tell you about that at the end of the month. Although, please don't ask Mr Young about how to get a child out of the planetarium, I think he found it a rather an ordeal - more details on that another day!

Have a lovely break! The Y5 team will be thrilled to see the children on the 30th.

Best wishes,

Mrs Angel