Welcome to Year 5

Ant and Mayfly are our Year 5 classes at the Isle of Ely Primary School. From this page you will be able to read about our curriculum each half term and all the work we get up to in and out of the classroom.

Who works in our classroom?

 

Mrs Jo Branson                 Mrs Berrill

 

Mrs Kiss

Our curriculum

This term, we will be learning:

Subject

Unit of Work

English

This half term, we will be focusing on the fictional story, The Maasai’s Dream. With this text, we will focus on the tools for describing ‘character’ such as:

  • Using show not tell verbs
  • Revealing the main character’s desires
  • Describing how the character develops
  • Adding relative clauses for extra detail

By the end of the unit, children will write their own wishing story using these tools. Later in the term, we will be using the model text, Should mobile phones be allowed in school? to learn the tools needed to write a discussion text.

Maths

The children will be looking back at their use of multiplication and division, including:

Exploring multiples and factors of numbers

  • Prime numbers
  • Squaring and cubing numbers
  • Inverse operations
  • Multiplying and dividing by 10, by 100 and by 1,000.

Science

This half term, we will be looking at Materials. We will be exploring their properties and whether or not they are soluble. We will also investigate reversible and irreversible changes and learn how matter can change.

History

This half term, the children will be discovering all about the Early British Empire. They will be learning about the origins of global trade, the East India Company and the motivation of the British to build an empire.

Geography

The children will be learning about mountains, discovering their different features. We will be looking at the world’s most famous mountains and their relation to the weather system.

Physical Education

The children will be learning more in dance (Friday) and football (Wednesday). Please make sure your children come into school in their PE kits on these days, bringing plenty of water and weather appropriate clothes.

Religious Education

This half term, the children will be learning more about Hindu deities and Hindu beliefs

Spanish

We will be learning how to describe our local area, including names for places such as pharmacy and supermarket. We will also be learning how to ask for directions.

Personal, Social and Health Education

This term, the children will be focusing on ‘Anti-Bullying’, as well as looking at ‘Family and Friends’ together.

Design and Technology

During our last week of term, we will have a D/T focus on Digital World: Monitoring Devices.

Art

This term, our focus for the children will be revisiting some further elements of art; form, symmetry, light and space, designing a piece using these features.

Computing

The children will be focusing on programming music with Scratch, a piece of programming software. Each lesson will have an e-safety focus included.

Music
  • We are focusing on looping and remixing this half term. By the end of the unit, the children should be able to  will be able to:
  •  Perform a looped body percussion rhythm; keeping in time with their group.
  • Use loops to create a whole piece of music, ensuring that the different aspects of music work together.
  • Play the first section of ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ with accuracy.
  • Choose a suitable fragment of music and be able to play it along to the backbeat.
  • Perform a piece with some structure and two different loops.

 

Our Class Text is:

The Girl who Stole an Elephant by Nizrana Farook

 

w/c 27.11.2023

This week has been the infamous Assessment Week! The children have embraced every assessment with enthusiasm and motivation and should be very proud of themselves. Maths, spelling and grammar assessments have been completed, interspersed with planning and writing their hot writes in English. Each child has planned their own wishing tale, based on the work that we have done in this unit and using the character toolkit. We have had stories ranging from dreaming about growing a luscious moustache, all the way through to wishing for clean water for their village. In art this week, the children experimented with using different media to create a range of textures for a future mountain landscape. They used water colours, oil pastels and colouring pencils in different ways to create a variety of textures.  In geography this week, we have moved on from UK mountains to learning about world mountain ranges and in R.E. we learnt all about Holi. 

w/c 20.11.2023

In English, this week, each class innovated a class wishing tale and the children wrote it in their own words using the character toolkit and the model text to guide them.  Mayfly wrote about a Albert Astro, who dreamed of being an inventor and travelling in time. Ant wrote about Oreo the panda, who dreamed of being colourful so other pandas liked him. Can your child tell you their innovated story? In maths, we have studied fractions, learning about mixed numbers and improper fractions.  In reasoning and problem solving we focused on visualising, and drawing problems to make them easier to solve.  In geography, we learnt about UK mountain ranges, and in history we learnt about how the British Empire grew during the seven years war. In art, pupils planned a landscape picture, thinking about the background, midground and foreground. In R.E. we learned how Diwali is celebrated by Hindus around the world.

 

w/c 13.11.2023

This week the children have learnt our new model text, The Masai's Dream, and begun to think about how to describe characters with adjectives and how to show their feelings using actions. See if they can retell you the story using the story map and actions they have learnt. The children have written lots of great sentences and poems in our short burst writing sessions.  In maths, we have been exploring fractions and learning how to find equivalent fractions and how to represent them with arrays, number lines and fraction bars.  The children are really enjoying learning about the expansion of the British Empire into India by the East India Tea Company in history and looking at how mountains are shown on maps in geography.  Pupils looked at Johannes Vermeer's use of light and dark in art and in RE they heard about Hindu devotion.  In science we explored how different materials insulate and thought about how to make a test fair. We have continued to practise choosing the correct homophone in spellings.

 

w/c 6.11.2023

Year 5 pupils really impressed us with their behaviour and interest in the careers fair at the Cathedral on Tuesday- thank you to the parents helpers who stepped in to help at short notice.  This week pupils have written their own persuasive texts and they have planned and written a cold write of a character description. In maths, we have completed our current unit on multiplication and division, learning how to multiply and divide by 10, by 100 and by 1,000 by moving numbers along a place value table.  In geography, we began looking at what a mountain is and in history we looked at how global trade benefitted England.  In art, we made symmetrical patterns using geometric shapes and in RE we went on a virtual tour of a Hindu Mandir. In spelling, we have been learning different homophones.

w/c 30.10.2023

The children have made a great start back at school after the half term break.  They have explored mechanisms and made their own pop-up books based on well-known nursery rhymes or stories.  They have planned their hot write persuasive texts and begun reading our new class story.  In maths, we have learnt about prime, square and cube numbers.  Pupils looked at how different rulers contributed to the foundations of the British Empire in history and in art, learned how geometric forms and organic patterns could be combined.

Finally, Next week is Anti-Bullying week. Please explore the parents and carers page here for more information and resources. The BBC’s Own It page also has a whole suite of links and clips to support your child with online behaviours.