Year 5 Class News

Living and Learning: Staying Safe Week

This week we have had a themed week all about staying safe. We have has plenty of visitors into school to talk to us about different ways we can stay safe.

On Monday, we learnt about road safety and Dave from D:Side taught us all about the dangers of vapes and cigarettes.

On Tuesday, the Health and Wellbeing team from Leeds City Council taught all about how to keep ourselves protected from infection and how best to treat different illnesses.

On Wednesday, British Military Martial Arts helped us energise ourselves and the fire service spoke to us about fire safety.

To finish off the week, we had an assembly all about water safety run by the Canal and River Trust.

We have also learnt in class about level crossings, peer pressure, respecting boundaries and recognising harmful relationships.

The children have all been very respectful to all the visitors and spoken maturely about all the issues raised.

Help at home by discussing this week’s learning and considering how the children can stay safe at home.

Forest School!

Year 5 have thoroughly enjoyed their second stint in Forest School this half term – particularly as the weather has got (a bit) warmer! They have been exploring the whole of the Green and having lots of fun. They have been making dens, lighting fires, cooking food and sawing wood!

The children are learning key skills around cooperation, assessing risks, resilience and healthy living. They are always so full of enthusiasm when they come back after a morning in the Forest School.

Just a reminder that the children still have one more Forest School session left on the first Friday back after half term (5th June) due to the INSET day next Friday.

Help at home by discussing the children’s favourite part of Forest School.

Guided Reading Week 3

Here are the target pages for this week’s guided reading. These need to be read by Friday 8th May.

Ghost Hunter– up to page 160

Kensuke’s Kingdom – up to page 117

Two weeks with the Queen – up to page 95

How to train your dragon – up to page 159

Spy fox– up to page 127

Considine Curse – up to page 137

Science – reversible changes

This week in Science, we have been looking at reversible changes. We mixed sand with water to create a mixture. Then, we separated the mixture using filter paper which captures the sand and let the water pass through.

Next, we dissolved some salt in some water. This made a solution so we couldn’t just filter the salt out. We decided that we wanted to test if we could use evaporation to separate the salt and water. We poured our solution into a petri dish and left it on the window sill to see what happened.

We observed the changes over the next few days, making sure we recorded our findings in our books. We were very excited to see the salt reappear.

Help at home by talking to your child about their experiment. Is there any other time they have seen evapoartion?

Living and Learning: Being Safe

We took part in the NSPCC Speak out Stay Safe online assembly.

During the assembly, it highlighted children’s rights and gave the clear message of ‘Speak out, Stay safe’. The children were confident at identifying who their own trusted adults are and felt comfortable that they could ask for help.

We also heard about Childline – ask your child to show you the way to remember the number.

To follow up this learning, we welcomed staff from NSPCC to deliver a ‘Speak Out Stay Safe’ workshop. They were very impressed with the children’s learning and understanding.

Help at home: Discuss who your child would speak to if they needed help and/or visit the Childline website, which has age-appropriate advice for primary school children on topics such as bullying. It also has games and other interactive tools.

Living and Learning: Staying safe themed week 18 May

Our next whole school themed week, based around Staying Safe, will be taking place from Monday 18 May 2026.  The key message is how to be safe in a range of situations – at home, at school, online and in the environment.

A variety of events and visitors are planned to help us deliver this key aspect of education including road safety (Leeds City Council); water safety (Canal and River Trust and RNLI); fire safety (West Yorkshire Fire Service); first aid; safety in our community (PCSOs), martial arts (BMMA) and drug education (d:side). Some of the events require parental permission and these letters have been sent out separately.

There are also some opportunities for parents and carers, from all year groups, to get involved in the week.

Thursday 14 May from 8:30am West Yorkshire Police bike register event

Pupils are invited to bring along their bikes to be registered at this bike security marking event at school. Registering your bike helps police and retailers identify and verify the legitimate owner of bikes that have been stolen or are being resold.

Tuesday 19 May 3pm – 3:30pm d:side drug education drop in information session (playground)

A representative from d:side, a health education provider, will be available to discuss details of your child’s drug education learning in the themed week.

The themed week is a good opportunity to continue to think about healthy, active and safe ways to travel to school.  Children are encouraged to travel to school in a sustainable way, keeping safe along the way.

For a chance to win one of three £10 vouchers, we’d love to see their active travel staying safe photos, maybe using a traffic crossing or wearing their bike helmet (send photos to moortownoffice@spherefederation.org). Photos should be sent by 10am on Thursday 21 May and winners will be announced on the same day.

Due to the rising costs of visitors to school, this year, we are requesting a voluntary contribution of £2 per pupil to go towards paying for visitors. This can be made on Arbor. Thank you for your support with this.

Finally, can you help? Does your job involve an aspect of safety?  If you are able to support our Staying Safe themed week by coming into school to speak to the children, please contact me via the office or your child’s class teacher.

We will keep you up to date about events during the week on the class news pages on our website.

Thank you for your support to keep Moortown a happy, healthy and safe school.

Guided Reading Week 2

Here are the target pages for this week’s guided reading. These need to be read by Friday 8th May.

Ghost Hunter– up to page 95

Kensuke’s Kingdom – up to page 69

Two weeks with the Queen – up to page 61

How to train your dragon – up to page 103

Spy fox– up to page 85

Considine Curse – up to page 85

Maths: factors, multiples and primes

Over the past two weeks, we have been learning about factors, multiples and primes in Year 5. We have learnt how to find all the factors of a number, as well as find common factors between two numbers. We have learnt what prime, square and composite numbers are and how to identify them.

Prime number: has exactly 2 factors.

Square number: has an odd number of factors.

Composite number: has more than 2 factors.

This unit of work ended with us creating factor multiple chains within 100. You begin with a number less than 100 and then find a factor of this number. Next find a multiple of the new number and then a factor of this number etc..

For example:  64, 4, 32, 8, 88, 11….

We first played cooperatively where we had to work together to create the longest chain. Afterwards, we played competitively where we had to stop the other person be able to continue the chain. Some of us worked out a way we could always win using our knowledge of numbers! It was great fun.

Help at home by playing a game of factor multiple chains.

Summer term after-school clubs

Geography – Explorers

This half term will be learning all about Geography and exploring the Amazon rainforest. The vocabulary we have been learning about is listed below.

We will be learning about deforestation, biomes and climate zones as well as parts of the rainforest. The children are really looking forward to this topic. This week we have learnt about the different biomes in Brazil and how they compare with biomes in the UK.

We found out that Brazil has lots more biomes than the UK. I wonder if your child could tell you why.

Help at home by reading more about the Amazon rainforest. Can you find out 3 interesting bits of information?