Science: Space
Year 5 have now started their second science topic: Space! This week, we have learnt about our Solar System.
Here are some key facts we learnt:
- The Solar System is made up of the Sun, celestial bodies, eight planets and their moons.
- The Sun, Earth, Moon and other planets are approximately spherical bodies.
- The Sun is a star which releases heat and light and is at the centre of the Solar System.
- All of the planets in our Solar System orbit the Sun.
- The first four planets have solid surfaces whilst the last four planets have gas surfaces.
• Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars all have solid surfaces.
• Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune have gas surfaces. - Pluto is now considered a dwarf planet.
Then, we carried out research using secondary sources (a form of scientific enquiry). We used this information to create posters about the order of the planets and wrote down more key facts about each one.
Finally, we made mnemonics to remember the order in which the planets orbit the sun.
Help at home: Come up with a new mnemonic to remember the order of our solar system. Here is an example:
Mercury My
Venus Very
Earth Epic
Mars Marvellous
Jupiter Jumper
Saturn Suits
Uranus Unique
Neptune Neil
Or why not watch the ‘we are planets’ song.
Tom Palmer local events
This year, some children at school attended an online workshop with author Tom Palmer. Tom Palmer has been in touch to let us know about some local events he is attending in half term.
Message from Tom
For children and families – I am also coming to Leeds on Thursday 2 November
2023 :
* Farsley Book Festival – 10am-11am more here
https://trumanbooks.co.uk/event/flf-kids-day
* Chapel Allerton Library – 2pm
* Pudsey Community Hub and Library – 4pm
Writing: Non-Chronological Reports
For the past couple of weeks, Year 5 have been planning, writing and publishing their own non-chronological reports about a fictional city. The children were able to create their own made-up city and their task was ‘to give information’ (the purpose of a report).
Their writing needed to link to some of our geography learning (urban green spaces and city expansion) as well as contain parenthesis and a variety of sentence starters.
Have a look at some of our fantastic work:
Help at home: Look at this class post and the children’s work, try to spot parenthesis and a variety of sentence starters.
Bonfire Night Safety Visit
This morning, we were joined by our local PCSOs to talk about bonfire night safety. Have a look at our photos for the main messages.
PE: Football
This half term, Year 5 have been practising their football skills (passing, tackling, shooting etc.)
This week, they have been focused on improving their shooting skills.
When shooting, the difficulty is shot selection. Sometimes, it’s important to shoot with more power. At other times, it’s important to shoot with more accuracy.
The children have all enjoyed celebrating their goals!
Help at home: discuss the best technique for a pass.
Leeds Diving opportunities
Recently, Year 2 and 3 welcomed Leeds Diving as part of their talent in diving programme.
If your child is interested in learning to dive, please see the information and requirements below.
Reading: Y5 met Liz Pichon!
Last week, we had a surprise video call from author Liz Pichon – who writes the Tom Gates novels.
Liz talked about where she gets inspiration for her stories and how she plans out the novels before writing. She talked us through how she draws the doodles in her stories and we also had a go – what do you think of our bugs?!
Finally, she read an extract from her new book, Five Star Stories.
Living and Learning: I respect others!
In our Living and Learning lesson this week, Year 5 learnt about discrimination and the protected characteristics.
Discrimination is defined as ‘the unfair treatment of people because of who they are or because they have a certain characteristic(s)’. We discussed examples and the impact of discrimination.
The Equality Act 2010 protects people from discrimination based on protected characteristics.
We remember the protected characteristics by using the mnemonic:
DR S GRAMPS
Disability
Race
Sex
Gender reassignment
Religion or beliefs
Age
Marriage or civil partnership
Pregnancy and/or maternity leave
Sexual orientation
Help at home: Name the protected characteristics without looking.
Geography: Fantastic Fieldwork!
On Friday, Year 5 ventured to Moortown Park – an urban green space – to conduct their Geography fieldwork. The children were trying to measure carbon stores in the locality. Carbon stores are known as ‘places where carbon is stored in the environment’. To calculate this, they measured the girth (the distance around the outside of something thick) of different trees. They did this by sampling: a way of collecting fieldwork data without measuring everything.
This coming week, we will use this information to work out how much carbon is stored in the trees.
Have a look at us being geographers:
Help at home: To link with our writing skills, spot the parenthesis used in this post!
Watch Us While We Work
Thank you to all the adults who came to Watch Us While We Work this morning; it was lovely to see you all in our classroom. If you were unable to make it, continue to read to find out what we got up to.
To start, we looked at different strategies to help us learn our spellings. As you know, we have 40 spellings to learn by the end of the half term and therefore, finding fun ways to learn them is essential.
Here are a few we completed in class today:
We then moved on to practise our times tables, using our counting stick and dry wipe times table worksheets. To end the session, we read this week’s reading fluency text (I wandered lonely as a cloud by William Wordsworth) with a focus on our oracy targets.
We hope to see you next time!