It's been a busy couple of weeks in Birch Class!
Our Year 5s have been working hard to start on the first draft of their myths and hoping to finish the by the end of this week. There is such a big imagination in the class, we can't wait to see the end result! Not to mention, they've been helping Miss Simpson write hers too! We have just finished multiplication and division in maths and everyone has been brilliant. This morning, we did a recap Kahoot on everything we'd learned before they did an assessment and it went so well that it promised to be a regular thing for maths from now on! In RE, we've been learning about Hinduism and why Hindus want to be good people. Last week, we used Snakes and Ladders to learn about Dharma, Karma and Moksha! We made our own board with actions and consequences for the snakes and the ladders they drew on themselves. Ask the children how they're linked and how they did when they played a few rounds. We're coming to an end of our first geography topic, Biomes! Next week, we'll be making our own posters about one of the biomes they will be learning about this week. So far we've talked about the different things that can affect and create different biomes such as precipitation, latitude, ocean currents and climate! As the end of term one approaches, we can't wait to see everything that Birch Class achieve. It will be exciting to share what hard work they've gotten up to!
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One week of this half term down!
In English, Birch class have been learning how to write descriptive settings that make the readers feel like they're actually there by using our senses. Our writing project this half term will be writing their own myth, linked to our new novel Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief. This week we have also looked at the Story of Arachne in guided reading to start to get an idea of the characteristics of myths. We have just finished our first week of statistics in maths which included creating our own bar chart about the hair colours in Birch Class. We discussed the different parts of bar charts and line graphs and why they're important. All of Birch Class have also done a fantastic job at reading and interpreting both types of charts. We have nearly wrapped up our history topic. Next week we will be writing our essay on who the greatest monarch is and I can't wait to read them. Ask your children who they think the greatest monarch they have learned about is! Let's not forget about our personal correspondent in Glasgow! The children in Year 3, 4, 5 and 6 have been hearing about what's been going on at COP26. This week they've seen which leaders have been taking part (including Nicola Sturgeon and the Archbishop of Canterbury!). She has explained what goes on inside the blue zone at the conference and told us about the talks she went to. Our students were particularly interested in the talk she went to about climate change and TV. Make sure to ask your children about that! Welcome back to school everyone! I hope you're all excited for the second half of the Autumn term, I know I am!
It's a very exciting week in the UK this week with the COP26 climate change conference happening in Glasgow. World leaders will be deciding how to put stop climate change and Chagford Primary will have its very own correspondent in attendance. Beth (Miss Simpson's sister!) will be watching the negotiations and providing a comprehensive summary of the events. She will also answer any questions that the students have in additional videos. In our English lessons, we will be starting to learn about story writing. This week will focus on effective settings and characterisation to get the reader engaged! We will also be starting our statistics unit in maths by making, reading and interpreting different kinds of charts. We will be wrapping up our history topic on medieval monarchs in the next two weeks. Our last monarch will be Elizabeth I and then the students will be writing their essays to decide who the greatest monarch of the medieval era was! After that, we will move onto Another great week has passed in Birch Class!
In English, we've been finishing our final drafts of our hotel brochure. The Year 5s in Birch Class have produced extra persuasive and extra spooky brochures. We have also been reading the Nothing to See Here Hotel in class. Ask the students about Nancy the chef and Mrs. V who lives in the conservatory. They should be able to tell you about the nasty goblin prince, Grogbah, and tell you their predictions for the rest of the story! We have started a new maths topic, recapping different methods for adding and subtracting four digit numbers before finding ot how to do it with more than four digits. They can even solve problems that include both adding and subtracting in the same question! Since the last blog post, the Year combined Year 5 and 6 class have continued to learn about Richard and John before we moved on to John's grandson, Edward I. Ask them about his invasions of Scotland AND Wales and how he improved parliament as they have been putting together a fact file on his life. Finally, a big congratulations to the students are their amazing singing at the Harvest Festival this past Wednesday. You were all wonderful! And thank you to everyone who donated! We've had an exciting first month in Birch Class. Here's some of our highlights of our mornings:
In English, we have been learning about persuasive writing by building up our skills to write a brochure for the Nothing to See Here Hotel, the perfect holiday vacation for monsters. We have investigated other brochures and discovered what makes people want to go to these places. Our word wheel helped us to build up our adjectives and helping to fix parts of Miss Simpson's brochure has helped Birch Class understand the importance of punctuation, questions and professional language in persuasive writing. This past week, we have finished writing and editing our first drafts and learned how to use sentence starters to create different sentences, ready to move on to our second draft. In maths, the topic is place value. We have learned about numbers up to a million and how to round to the nearest 10, 100 and 1,000 within that. We have explored number sequences in the powers of ten and which numbers change when we do. This past week, we discovered negative numbers and how to mark them on number lines. On Monday, we'll be wrapping up our place value topic by looking at roman numerals including how to write the date and use them in calculations. In the afternoons, we are joined by the Year 6 students in Maple Class. Here's what we have been learning about in some of our lessons: Our science topic is separating mixtures. We started off with a recap on solids, liquids and gases and what they look like in their molecules look like. Our very first experiment expored at the ways different mixtures interacted by first predicting what we thought would happen by drawing the molcules in beakers and then mixing them together. The class were most excited about the way oil sat on top of water rather than mixing together. This past week we learned about alloys and how mixing weak metals like copper and tin together can create stronger metals like bronze. Not to mention the most successful alloy being steel, a mixture of carbon and iron. In history, we have been learning about medieval monarchs. We started in 1066 with an exploration into the three contendors for the throne after Edward the Confessor and a dramatic retelling of the Battle of Hastings which saw William the Conqueror take the throne. The second monarch we looked at was Henry II, who fought with Thomas Becket, the church and even his own sons. This past week, we got to meet two of his sons: Richard Lionheart and King John 'Lackland' and we discussed whether one was truly better than the other. Every new monarch we learn about, we consider what made them a good king and what made them a bad king. Welcome back for the new year here in Birch Class. We will use this space to tell you what we have been up to and to share pictures of our learning.
I love a maths project where we can use our skills in the real world and pulls together loads of different aspects of our learning throughout the year and that’s exactly what we’ve really got stuck into this week with our bakery project!
We’ve started with a recipe for 6 cupcakes and Birch class have had to adapt the recipe for the number of cupcakes they want to make. Lots of fraction work, multiplying and dividing – fantastic! Now we’re going shopping and trying to figure out which products are the best value for money. We’re learning to compare the prices of different pack sizes (more fractions, converting measures), working out the cost per unit (multiplying and dividing), and considering special offers (percentages) all to make the most of our hard earned cash. Just an FYI parents… they all insisted they shop at Waitrose – we have some very discerning shoppers. We’ve also been working hard in Science, drawing circuit diagrams for our light decoration to celebrate key workers; we’ve been share-writing in English – there has been some beautiful language being used (resplendent, majestic, treacherous); our Egyptian death masks are coming along really nicely (thank you Mr Dray!) and we’ve had some really interesting discussions about following and supporting one another’s dreams when we looked at a film about a male Finnish Ballet dancer and how he found it difficult to tell his friends about his passion. I hope you all have a less wet and blustery weekend! Take care, Mr B May marches on and another happy week passes in Birch Class. We’ve got so much going on! From Tutankhamun Death Masks in Art, Cricket Coaching with Andy, a very exciting cupcake/bakery project in Maths, we’re imagining and bringing to life a whole new island in English, understanding how to use search engines in computing, designing electronic decorations to celebrate key workers in Science/DT, we explored a different way of living in the Amazon Rainforest, and lots, lots more.
Throughout all of this, we’ve been working really hard on promoting good learning behaviours to one another and the rest of the school. As the oldest and wisest, it’s our responsibility to be good role models for the younger children and it sets us up for success as we begin to think about moving on to Secondary school. Here’s a great picture of the class, with clear desks and demonstrating a readiness for learning! Great stuff Birch Class! Another lovely week whizzes by in Birch Class! We’ve had great fun in Mr Dray’s art lesson where we’re making Ancient Egyptian death mask with papier mache, we’re learning all about the Beatles and singing a few of their greatest hits with Miss Rowe, we found out what was going on up on Dartmoor during the time of Ancient Civilizations, ran a mile and a half as part of an inter-schools OCRA organized event (the daily mile training really paid off for this one!) and we’ve been working scientifically in science as we plan investigations to answer enquiry questions about electrical circuits! All in that in four days as well as a lot of angles work in Maths, cricket coaching from Andy in PE and a fair bit of vocabulary work in English. We do like to keep busy! I hope the sun keeps on shining for the rest of the weekend – have a good rest Birch Class – you deserve it! Mr B It’s been another very lovely week in Birch class full of angles, electricity, ancient civilizations, papier Mache, Beatles singing and marathon completions! But I what I really want to share with you this week is Luca’s superbly surreal writing about an island he created that had us in stitches when he read it to the class.
‘200 miles off the east coast of California, lies a desolate island with everything Italian except the language the inhabitants speak. They speak Japanese which is very strange. It was first discovered by a custard cream in 1634; Sir Custard Biscuit Boy. Off the east cost of the island lies a leaning tower of pizza that is made entirely from the finest pizzas. The pizzas are cooked by a chef who isn’t actually Italian. He is a German exchange student who died after making this sculpture.’ Have a great bank holiday weekend! Mr B |
AuthorWelcome to the class blog for Year 5 - Birch Class at Chagford Primary School Archives
April 2024
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