Springwood have been working really hard this week in Maths translating, reflecting and rotating shapes. We really challenged ourselves with complicated shapes, rotating them at different distances from the point of origin. We also did a spot of algebra on Friday afternoon – it’s not so mysterious anymore!
In Literacy, we have been practising our reading comprehension skills. We have looked at a range of texts, answering questions which required quotation, thinking about the author’s intention, and thinking about how the author creates dramatic effects. We also tried our hand at creating a persuasive advert for a new ice cream maker, and after looking at the different features we should have included, assessed each other’s work.
On Friday afternoon, we had our first cricket lesson. The weather was beautiful, and we had lots of fun trying to hit the wickets!
This week in Numeracy, Springwood have been looking at the equivalence of decimals, fractions and percentages. We ended the week using this to solve word problems involving sheep on a farm.
Our Literacy work has been centred around explanation and instruction texts. Having come up with our own weird and wonderful transport ideas for the future, we wrote an information guide containing instructions and diagrams targeted at a specific demographic.
During Science, we looked at how plants reproduce and how this fits into their life cycle. We learned about the different parts of a plant and what purpose they serve, then used all of this information to begin create our own comic strips for the life cycle of a plant.
On Thursday, we all brought in a book for World Book Day. These books will be donated to children in Africa who do not have books of their own.
Following tag rugby, The Year 5 children completed their English Speaking Board exam on Friday, on a wide range of topics. Well done!
This week, Springwood have been looking at instruction and explanation texts. We started off by following the instructions for a number of different card games and evaluating how effective they were.
Our RE lessons this week have been extremely creative. We utilised incense sticks, candles, fruit and ribbon to create hindu shrines. The results were vibrant and colourful, as you can see!
In recognition of shrove Tuesday, we flipped and filled pancakes. They were delicious!
Our numeracy lessons this week have been centred around solving problems involving rates and scale. We’ve also been using mental strategies to multiply and divide decimals with one or two decimal places.
This week, Springwood have been continuing their work on Slam Poetry. With the knowledge that we can write a poem about anything, we began to think about adjectives and phrases to describe everything from doughnuts to football. Using these ideas, we chose something to write a poem about and planned it, including some sort of dialogue.
Our maths work has been focussed on perimeter, area and volume. We started the week by finding the area of rectangles, and are now able to find the perimeter of shapes with missing lengths, the area of composite shapes, and the volume of cuboids.
In our topic work, we have been looking at electric circuits. This week, we made burglar alarms. Springwood came up with everything from tripwires (made out of slinkies) to aluminium foil mats that completed a circuit when stood on.
We were very lucky to have Matt from ‘City of Zombies’ come in to teach us how to play. It’s a game that uses mental maths skills to defeat a hoard of attacking zombies. We had a lot of fun!
On Thursday we had our first hockey lesson in Henley. It was a little bit cold, but we persevered and enjoyed practising our new skills.
In Science this week, we have been looking at electric circuits. We started off by evaluating board games that required batteries. Later on in the week, we had a go at creating our own electric circuits. We used batteries, buzzers, bulbs, motors and switches. Starting off with a simple circuit containing a bulb, we added other components into our circuits to see what would happen. We found that when we added motors or buzzers, the bulbs would get a lot dimmer.
In Maths, we have been looking at shapes and angles. We started the week by classifying 3D shapes according to the number of faces, edges and vertices, then we created nets for cuboids and triangular prisms. Next, we looked at 2D shapes, and the sum of the angles in triangles, circles and quadrilaterals. We have been drawing our own triangles and quadrilaterals, and measuring the angles within them.
Our Literacy work has been focussed around performance poetry. We listened to some slam poetry, thinking about the features used and whether we preferred listening to it or reading it ourselves. We finished the week by writing our own stanzas for an existing poem. Some of us even performed them in Starbook assembly!
Springwood have done a number of different sports activities this week. On Wednesday, Y5 went to Kennylands to do gymnastics. On Thursday, we did our first bit of hockey, practising basic skills such as how to hold a stick and keeping control of the ball. Finally, on Friday we had our first session of tag rugby. Please can all children remember to bring their PE kits into school on Monday and to leave them in school until Friday, to ensure that they are properly prepared for PE lessons.
This week, Springwood have looked at the correct use of semi-colons. We used them to separate two related clauses in a sentence, and to separate items in a list where each item is more than a couple of words long.
In Numeracy, we have been doing long multiplication, multiplying 2-digit numbers by numbers with 3 and 4 digits. We then practised solving word problems, and had to choose an appropriate method to do so.
Our music lessons have been spent learning techniques for creating sound tracks and film scores in order to compose our own music for an animation entitled ‘Abstract Albert’. Through practise, we found that in order for the music to be effective, it had to be synchronised with what was happening on screen. Watch our finished animation below.
To adorn our Christmas tree, we created reindeer. Using brown pom poms for the body and black pipe cleaners for legs proved to be very effective, and we used googly eyes as the finishing touch to their foam faces.
After watching Frozen, we had lots of delicious food at our class party on Thursday. Have a lovely Christmas everybody!
This week in maths we have been doing ratios and looking over our SATs papers. In ratio lessons we were going out on a pretend picnic so we needed to share out sandwiches (Miss Ballantyne was very greedy.)
In art we have been very Christmassey making Christmas cards which was very fun and we have been making paper Christmas baubles and paper mache baubles which was very messy.
In literacy we have been doing reports for the book Tuesday as well as looking at passive and active language.We also have been looking over our writing papers.
This week, Springwood have been looking at probability, ratio and proportion in numeracy. To help us to understand that probability describes the likelihood of something happening, we have been rolling dice and drawing coloured counters from cups, tallying up the number of times a certain event occurs.
We continued our work surrounding the book ‘Tuesday’ in Literacy, and have begun to write reports about what happened. The focus of these reports was to use formal language, in addition to reported speech.
To round off assessment week with some Christmas cheer, we finished Friday by making Christmas cards. We layered different coloured card and had the option of using foam to create a 3D effect. Next week we will make some decorations to make our class tree a bit less bare!