This week’s Practice Makes Perfect homework focuses on fractions work and is due on Wednesday 03 February.
To be able to work with fractions.
There is a booklet inside homework books this week that requires the children to practise the many skills required to confidently work with fractions. All of these skills have been used in our Maths lessons this week and will be used again next week. There is an explanation or example for each skill to help the children to work independently.
This week’s Creative homework is due on Wednesday 03 February.
To be able to show what I know about life in the ocean.
Our Life topic will focus on life in the oceans next week as this is where all life began. Think about what you know already about the world’s ocean and the life it holds today, or has held in the past, and present this creatively.
Here are a few ideas to get you started:
We’ve all tried something new this week. Our art project, linked to our Life topic, has been to create a new hybrid animal and then paint it onto silk. None of us had ever tried silk painting before and we all enjoyed doing something new.
Once we’d designed our new animal, we drew it on silk before going over our design in ‘gutta’. This is an outline which hold the paint inside the lines of your drawing. We practised on paper before using the gutta on silk.
Once our outline was complete, we painted the silk and loved watching how the colours would merge and bleed into each other to create a lovely effect.
What do you think of our final paintings?
We really enjoyed getting up close and personal with some real life animals as part of our Life topic this week. We wore a snake as a scarf and learnt all about how the patterns of its scales help it to hide from its prey.
We also used our maths skills to estimate how long it was and then measured it against our own height to compare.
Next, we met some rainforest chickens and learnt all about how the mother has to sit on her eggs to keep them warm so that they’ll hatch.
Finally, it was time for the creepy crawly – a tarantula. Only the bravest dared hold this little creature.
What a fantastic experience for us all. Thanks to Miss Valentine for organising it!
We enjoyed our visit to Leeds City Museum on Friday morning. In three groups, we each focussed on one animal: polar bear, gorilla and sea turtle.
We started by visiting one of the museum exhibitions in order to find our animal and sketch it, noting what features it had and what it might use these for.
Then, once we’d had a chance to take a look around at all of the other interesting things inside the exhibition, we decided to take a closer look at some animals, exploring skulls and taxidermy.
We thought about how these animals were adapted to live in their environment before working as a team to create a 3D collage of our animal.
We had a great time and returned very excited to continue learning through our Life topic.
For our Practice Makes Perfect homework this week, we’re working on skills we’ve been developing in Maths.
To be able to find missing lengths and work out perimeter and area.
The children need to use the information they already have to work out the size of the missing lengths. They can then use this information to work out perimeter and area.
This homework is due on Wednesday 27 January.
This week’s Talk Time homework is linked to our Life topic and is due on Wednesday 27 January.
Debate: Choose an animal and prepare to argue that it is the ‘best’ animal.
You’ll need to think about the positive points about that animal and have evidence to back it up. Don’t forget to consider what negatives it might have so that you can counter argue any negative points brought up by any other debater.
More fab homework to kick off our Big Topic. Lots of creative ideas made our weekly homework review very enjoyable and we learnt lots from, and about, each other.
Diagrams, messages, facts and pictures were just some of the things we saw around the classroom.
We really enjoyed this poem from Riya…
Many of use decided to go ‘techno’ this week so we also enjoyed listening to, reading and playing the many PowerPoint presentations, blogs and coding that came from the Y5 email.
This week has seen the launch of our new Big Topic, ‘Life’.
It’s an exciting week for us as it comes with a great (very informative) class assembly and a trip to Leeds Museum on Friday morning. We started our topic with an incredible journey from the beginning of Earth, 4.6 billion years ago, to this very day.
As a class, we created a giant timeline in our classroom and then wrote some fantastic, detailed recounts on it.
We’ll be using our ‘Life’ knowledge in English over the next few weeks to write informative texts on various animals: old, new and some just plain old fictitious. Help at home by looking through animal information books, magazines and websites for some vocabulary the children could learn and use in their own writing.
In Maths, we’re focussing on fractions, percentages and decimals. We need to know the relationship between these three areas of Maths and be able to fully understand what they mean and how to use them. At home, help by drawing images of fractions and then identify the equivalent percentage and decimal.
Last week, Y5 explored which solvents (substances) would create a solution when added to a solvent (water).
If you can’t see any of the particles from the solvent (salt, sugar, rice, sultanas etc…), it has created a solution. If the particles of the solvent sink to the bottom, this is called a residue and a solution has not been created.
Can you get the solvent back once it has been mixed into the solute (water), even if it made a solution?
We sieved and filtered our variables to find out whether we got any back.
The rice and sultanas could be separated from the water and some things were trapped by the filter but lots of our tests still haven’t separated. We’re now leaving them to evaporate to see if anything is left in the cup once the water has all gone.