Teachers: Mrs Clark, Mr Hadden & Mrs Durkin
Teaching Assistants: Mrs Jenner, Mrs Snow
Summer Term
To begin with, there will be a mini-quest focusing on the life cycle aspect of science. After this, the children will be completing a series of challenges related to the title of this summer’s quest learning. These will include map skills, researching the history of somewhere in Devon, writing linked poetry, completing art work about life cycles and also investigating populations of certain animals.
We are also reading through ‘The island at the end of everything’. In this book, the author sensitively explores the mature themes of loss, separation and fear through the eyes of a young girl removed from her mother’s care and placed in an orphanage – but here she makes some great friends and manages to escape to go in search of home. In keeping with our term’s theme, we will be studying a book called ‘Weslandia’ which is about a young chap who, unhappy with the realities of school, spends his summer creating his own civilisation. This links with the geography work we will do researching our local area.
Please click on our topic map to see the rest of this term's exciting learning journey.
Spring Term
The main focus for our topic this half term is Science. We will be using our focus on Captain Scott and his expedition to the South Pole to: Compare and group together everyday materials on the basis of their properties, including their hardness, solubility, transparency and insulation. Use knowledge of solids, liquids and gases to decide how mixtures might be separated, including through filtering, sieving and evaporating. Science skills will be specifically taught and investigations linked to these objectives will be carried out over half term. The investigations will allow the children to further their skills in predicting, planning fair tests, collecting results and explaining their results using scientific language.
Please click on the PDF to see the rest of our exciting learning map for Spring Term.
Autumn Term
Our Exploring Space topic began by recreating a cockpit environment and watching a video of a real space mission launch into space. Seeing 60 children, (and the Headteacher) lying on their ‘cockpit seats’ facing the ceiling was a sight to behold! This vast and fascinating area of science shall be linking all of our learning together up until half term and we are sure that children will be inspired to find out more too. We are in the process of building our own Moon Buggies as part of DT whilst in Literacy We are reading through our first text of the year, ‘Cosmic’, by Frank Cottrell Boyce. This is proving to be a real hit with the children. Learning from the structure and content of this story, children shall be creating their own, shorter version over the course of the first month of term.
In Maths we are spending a week learning fascinating facts about how our brains actually make more connections when we really struggle with a learning challenge. Lots of thought provoking questions and activities form the focus of each lesson but the message is clear – replace fixed mindset thoughts with growth mindset statements like the ones below in order to reach your potential as a mathematician:
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Fixed mindset |
Growth mindset |
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I’m not good at this |
What am I missing? |
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I can’t make this any better |
I can always improve. |
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I give up |
I’ll use a different strategy. |
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I’ve made a mistake. I’ve failed. |
Mistakes help me to learn. |
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I just can’t do this |
I am going to train my brain. |
After this we settled into our Year 5 routine and have had a great two weeks getting our teeth into our learning and familiarising ourselves with the new routines and expectations.
Having completed our Exploring Space topic, in Science, we will be studying forces and the machines that help make working against these forces easier e.g. pulleys, wheels, wedges, screws. Two investigations based on both science topics shall be undertaken in due course.
As well as this, we will be studying the unit ‘People of God’ from the scheme ‘Understanding Christianity’ in RE where the children will be looking at how following God can bring freedom and justice.
The children are learning how to play the guitar in Music and in PE are either swimming or playing tennis. All year 5’s will have swimming lessons for a 6 week unit over the course of this year. We will be following an indoor scheme of work which develops key skills across PE skills base.