Our Mission Statement
We have thought about what we want our classroom to be like. We have used these ideas to write our class mission statement.
School Rules
British Values - Rule of Law
Class rule and expectations.
In our British Values lesson we spoke about the rule of law. Rules and laws are everywhere at home, in school, even when you play a game. A regulation is a rule made by an authority. Breaking rules and laws is likely to get you into trouble at the very least!
We made our own rules for our classroom and the children discussed what the consequences should be if they are broken.
British Values - Democracy
Electing a class Councillor
In our British Values lesson we looked at how rules and decisions are made. We found out that votes are used to make agreements and find out the most popular plan.
In democracy every citizen should listen to the views of the different parties and candidates, and then make his or her own decision on whom to support. People must be 18 or over in order to take part in an election. We agreed that this is a good age as children would not always make an informed decision.
When voting, each person votes for the candidate of his or her choice. S/he does this by putting a cross beside the person’s name on the ballot paper. People cast their ballots in a booth so that no one can see who they are voting for. This is called ‘secret ballot’.
At the end of the election day the votes are added up and the candidate with the highest number of votes (the majority) is declared the winner.
We are too young to vote in elections but we have been exercising our right for democracy. Our class needs a class Councillor so we wrote manifestos and voted for the person that we thought would do the best job representing our class.
Here are the candidates who went up to represent 5L in our school council.
Every single person did a fantastic job of reading them out loud to the class, and their speeches were fantastic! Well done!!
The person who got the most and therefore our new class councilor is...
Yusef Khan
Well done!
PHSE
In year 5 we have been looking at children's mental health. We focused on what we might be worried about and some children shared theirs to the rest of the class. A lot of us agreed that the current climate can be worrying and the safety of our families. We also agreed that going into year 6 and doing SATs can also be worrying. We wrote these worries down and then discussed who we could tell. We all came up with 5 different people that we could share our worries with.
Spanish
In Spanish we practiced the phrase ¿como te llamas?
We paired up and answered the questions and practiced our pronunciation. Some children even volunteered to have a conversation in front of the class.
Here are some children in 5L who have already achieved their pen license!
Their handwriting has been consistently joined up throughout all of their books and their presentation is beautiful.
Well done!!
English
In English we have been watching the animation clip of the lighthouse. The clip has no words but we have looked at detail which can be seen in the clip and thought about how we can use this to write our own narrative of the story. The children made plans to help them with their creative writing, and then wrote them up. We have made a fantastic display in our classroom with lots of the children's work.
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Mental health and Well-being/ English
We are looking at the book ‘What to do when you worry too much’. We have discussed how worries start and what can make them grow. We have also looked at how we can share and ignore worries and even how to make them smaller. We decided to write a letter advising someone on how to deal with their worries. We explained what a worry is and gave them tips in order to tackle their worry.
British values/ Food technology
On a Friday afternoon during our carousel we have been learning about national dishes. We researched dishes from all around the world and why they are important to that country. This week we have focused on a British dish, the scone. We have done some research on the history of the scone, where it originates from and why it is important to our country. Hopefully next week we can do some taste testing!
Congratulations to these children for receiving their penmanship award!
Well done Hannah, Jessica, Oliver and Annabelle!
English
This week in English we are looking at a new text- The Arrival. This story has no words, only pictures. This has challenged the children to use different skills, such as their inference skills, to figure out what is going on in each picture, without reading any words. We focused closely on one picture in particular. We thought of questions we wanted to find out about what is going on in the picture. We also thought about what the individuals in the picture were thinking and feeling by judging their facial expressions and the situation they were in.
After we had annotated the picture, we wrote a conversation out between the two characters in the picture. We focused on using inverted commas for speech, different synonyms for said and using adverbs.
History
In history we are looking at what mining was like in Yorkshire. We looked at the different roles that men, women and children did in the mine. These roles included the Hewer, the Trapper, the Thruster, the Hurrier and the Getter. People who did these jobs would be down the mines for up to 12 hours a day in pretty poor, dark conditions. We were shocked to find out that some children were as young as 5 years old! We created a mind map summarising the different roles which we will continue to look at next week.
Topic/guided reading
In our guided reading lesson we looked at information around food banks. We looked at why people in need use food banks and why they are so important for our communities. We also looked at the different variety of people who may need a food bank. We learnt that it is not just an individual who might be homeless, but it can affect many different people in different circumstances. We use our knowledge from the text and decided whether the statements we were reading were true or false.
Maths
In maths we have been looking at place value. Within this topic we must look at negative numbers. We spent a couple of days on this as we found it a little bit trickier than other topics. We started off by using a number line and identifying where certain negative numbers were. We then began finding the difference between two numbers (negative or positive). After working on our varied fluency we began answering reasoning and problem solving questions, which really made us think!
Food technology/British value
Continuing with our theme of British dishes and focusing on scones, we finally got to try a variety of shop bought scones! We tried 3 different types; plain, fruit and cheese scones. Whilst we tried them we evaluated them against different criteria's such as taste, smell, appearance and texture. We then decided what we really liked about the scone, and what could be done to improve it. After we had tried all three, we had some more plain scones, but this time with different toppings! We had clotted cream, jam and were extremely lucky to try Mrs Horrocks homemade lemon curd! It was by far the most delicious!! Here are some picture below of the different facial expressions when we were taste testing. I bet you can guess which we liked and which we didn't!!
Music
In music, Mrs Bedell has been looking at the lyrics to the Bon Jovi song Living on a prayer. The children have been learning the lyrics and working out what message the song writing wants to give. The children have looked at changing their voice to reach higher notes.
Assembly
In assembly we looked at mindfulness. We looked at different techniques to stay calm and relax, and forget about our worries. One technique we had a go at was mindfulness colouring. We put some relaxing music on and just focused on colouring in the picture. It was a fantastic start to the day and we all felt really relaxed!
Maths
To finish off our place value topic we looked at roman numerals. This can be very tricky and some of us found it quite confusing! However, we didn't give up and were determined to figure it out. We played a game where we had to match up the correct roman numeral to the correct number. We turned it into a race and the quickest people won a prize. Well done!
Here are a few snaps from our daily mile. We have been completing our daily mile every morning since the start of October. Rain or shine, we are outside on that playground!
PE
In PE we have been working on different ball skills and looking at different games in athletics. We have been making the most of the sun at the start of the term by doing most of our PE lessons outside, however, it is getting colder and wetter! But we have still managed to get our weekly outdoor PE lessons in!
Music
In the second half of our music lessons we have been learning how to play the Ukulele. This is something we have been quite unfamiliar with but each week we get better and better. We have been learning the basic notes and strumming techniques, and also looked at different rhythms. We really enjoy our weekly Ukulele lessons!
Topic
Finishing off looking at our mining topic, we looked at the 1984 strikes. We looked bat who took part in the strikes and the 'scabs' who carried on working. We tried to look at both sides of the argument and both saw both points of view. We did this by having a class debate. One half of the class were 'scabs' and the other half were strikers.
We then wrote a letter to a striker from a 'scabs' point of view explaining why we have decided to continue working.
Ava and Ivy wrote fantastic letters and read them out loud. Well done girls!
Artist Tim Curtis
Tim Curtis is a local artist from Baildon. Tim came into school today to to show us his inspirations for his art work. Tim has his own website which can be found following the link.
Tim showed us the work by Anthony Gormley and Ai Weiwei which inspired the idea for the project which we worked on. We used Anthony Gormley's terracotta figures as our vision for our work.
Here is the final product from our art work with Tim Curtis!
Food Technology/British values
We were finally able to do some baking in our carousel lesson on Friday afternoons! We created our own scones and worked in groups to put the correct ingredients together.
We made sure that the tables were properly wiped down and that we washed our hands thoroughly!
Using scales and a measuring jug we put the ingredients together and mixed it up! Then we put in our own twist! Some of us added chocolate chip, m&m's, oreo's and more!
Mrs Horrocks put our scones in the oven and took them out when they were ready!
We have left them in the freezer so they stay fresh for the following week!
We get to try them on the last day of term!
Here are some pictures of us finally trying our scones! They were delicious!
AUTUMN TERM 2
Science
In Science this half term we are looking at animals including humans. This involves us having a look at the human life cycle. We looked at all the different stages a human goes through in life and then talked about what happens at each stage and how we develop/change. We put the pictures of the different stages of a human life cycle in order and wrote about each one.
Remembrance Day
In 2020 we pay tribute to the men and women of the Second World War generation, and to those of today’s, who have served and sacrificed to defend our nation. We remember the collaboration of the Commonwealth and Allied nations who stood shoulder to shoulder then to secure our freedom and the communities coming together today to protect us all.
We read about Remembrance Day and then completed a Remembrance day Silhouette using colouring crayons. The dark silhouette stands out from the colourful background.
Bonfire night
We looked at the history of Bonfire Night during our guided reading lesson. We learnt about who Guy Fawkes was, why he decided to commit the crimes he did, and what punishments he was given as a result. We also looked at the important of Bonfire night and how to be safe during firework displays.
We decided to use the silhouette art idea from Remembrance day, and draw a Bonfire setting on black card with chalk. This looked really effective, especially when we smudged the chalk in to make it look smokey. We had lots of fun and even managed to stay relatively clean!!!
Black history
For the next few weeks we will be looking at black history and focusing on an individual who has influenced change in black history. We are focussing on Ruby Bridges, who is now an activist and key speaker. She is famous for being one of the first black children to be integrated into an all white school. She faced many problems and backlash from the community who disagreed with the ending of segregation. We believe she is a massive influential individual in black history and can’t wait to learn more about her.
In English we had a look at what Ruby and Mrs Henry (Ruby’s teacher) looked like and used our inference skills to figure out what they were like as people. We used lot’s of adjectives to describe them, such as brave and courageous.
African drumming
This afternoon we had a special visitor, who was called Rebecca, come and work with us. She specialises in African drumming and we all got an opportunity to play on a djembe drum. Rebecca went through different rhythms with us and also talked about the history of the djembe drum. We enjoyed our afternoon with Rebecca and wish we could do African drumming every week!
English
Continuing with looking at Ruby Bridges, we have started to write a diary in her perspective from her first day of school. We know that her first day must have been full of lots of different emotions. We used drama to act out the different emotions Ruby was experiencing at different parts of the day. We though of the emotion, and then we froze. This is called freeze frames. Here are some pictures, can you guess which emotions we are showing?
English
In English we are looking at writing a persuasive letter to the protesters who were against Ruby Bridges attending William Frantz School. We decided to have some mini debates with our partners in order to really voice our opinions on the matter. This helped us with our planning and also meant we could share ideas. Here are a few examples.
Maths Day
On Friday it was maths day. We started off by practicing our skills in a warm up task- this was very challenging but we worked in pairs! Then we decided to tackle 'The Riddle of The Sphynx'. This required us to crack the codes in order to find the correct Hieroglyphics. Next, we had a go on Times Table Rockstars and practiced for a little times table competition. Very impressed with the children who dressed up!
Science
In Science we looked at different parts of a flower and it's life cycle. Our task was to work in groups, memorize the different parts of the flower, then go into the corridor and label a blank picture. This really tested our memories, but it was lot's of fun! We then went through a flowers life cycle and wrote about it in our books.
Black History Month
To end the Black History Month topic, we have made a display of all of the different work work we have done about Ruby Bridges. We have enjoyed this topic and have learnt so much about how Ruby changed the lives of many other people.
Science
We have started a new topic in Science, which is the earth, the sun and the moon. We looked at why the earth is spherical and what evidence we have to prove this. We also looked at the sizes of the earth, the sun and the moon and we compared them to spherical objects we had in the classroom. Using the objects we tried to recreate the different orbits and rotations the earth and the moon do.
Here are some pictures of our experiment we did showing how the earth gets day time and night time. We used a football and a torch. We shone the torch (the sun) on the football (the earth) and rotated is on its axis like the earth. This showed us that one side of the earth is in the sun, whilst the other side is in darkness- thus how we get day and night.
RE
In RE we looked at St Andrews day, which is celebrated in Scotland. It's St Andrew's Day on the 30th November. He is the patron saint of Scotland. He is also the patron saint of Romania, Greece, Russia, Ukraine and Poland. Patron saints are chosen to be special protectors or guardians over things. We also coloured in some stained glass windows.
How Planets Orbit the Sun.
We have been learning about how the planets orbit the sun. We acted this out on the play ground in the snow! Which made it even more enjoyable!
The Solar System includes the Sun, the Earth (where you are now!) and all of the other planets, asteroids and comets that go around and around it.
You may think that the Earth is a pretty big place, but the Earth isn’t even the biggest planet in the Solar System. The biggest planet is Jupiter – you could fit 1,321 Earths inside Jupiter. The Sun is even bigger than Jupiter – it would take 1.3 million planets the size of Earth to fill the same volume as the Sun.
It takes just over 365 days for the Earth to travel all the way around the Sun. We call the length of time it takes to go around the Sun a year, but to make life easier, most years have 365 days and every 4th year has 366 days. We call a year with 366 days a leap year. The extra day is February 29th. 2012 was a leap year, and 2016 and 2020 will be leap years.
The same force that holds you on the surface of the Earth so that you don’t float away when you jump, is what keeps the Moon revolving around the Earth and the Earth revolving around the Sun. This force is called gravity and the first man to discover that it existed was Sir Isaac Newton in the 17th century.
Earth is the only planet on which we know that there have been plants and animals living. On some planets there is no air to breathe and on others it is either too hot or too cold. Some scientists think that creatures may have lived on Mars millions of years ago, when Mars was warmer and had more air – they try to find evidence to show this is true.
Until 2006, people thought that there were nine planets in the Solar System. The ninth planet was Pluto and it is even further away from the Sun than Neptune. Astronomers decided that Pluto was too small to be called a planet, so now there are only eight planets.
Spanish
In Spanish we have started a new topic- Los Instrumentos.
Today we had a look at some of the musical instrument in Spanish and worked on our pronunciation. We listened to the word first and then repeated it and really focused on how to pronounce the word. We also looked at the instruments that begin with la and el. This depends on whether it is feminine or masculine.
E-safety
It is extremely important for us to look at how to stay safe online. The Internet plays a massive role in all of our lives on a daily basis. This can include staying in contact with friends/family, playing on online games, shopping, social media, work purposes and many more. There are so many advantages and opportunities now we have the Internet.
However, we must learn how to stay safe online as there are many dangers and threats about. We had a look at what we can do to stay safe online and took a pledge. We pledge that we will always treat people with respect/nicely online and if we see anything inappropriate we will report it immediately. We also pledged that we will always keep our passwords and any personal information private and not share it with anyone else.
We also looked at what we can do online to keep ourselves safe. We focused on 3 main components; blocking, reporting and unsubscribing. We made information posters for people who may be unsure of how to use these 3 techniques.
English
In English we are looking at a book called The Promise. This is a short book with a deep and meaningful message about our planet, and how a person can change for the better!
In our lesson we really focused on the main character, the young girl. We looked at what her characteristics and emotions were like at the beginning of the book, and how they changed throughout. We did this using freeze frames. we all put ourselves in her shoes, and recreated her emotions stopping at different parts of the story. This really showed us how she completely changed from the start of the story compared to the end. Can you guess what kind of facial expressions/emotions we are recreating?
The start of the story-
The end-
Maths
In our Maths lesson we have been looking at multiples and factors. In order to help us identify different factors for certain numbers, we used counters. This helped us make arrays and we could see the factors visually. We could also move the counters around and make different factors. We realised factors always come in pairs, for example 3 and 4 are factors of 12. However, there are an odd number of factors when we have square numbers!
Maths
We have continued to use counters throughout our maths lessons this week. We used them when we were looking at prime numbers. A prime number is a number that only has two factors (itself and 1). We could show this using the counters as the only way to represent this number was with a straight line. See pictures below.
We also used them to show square numbers. Square numbers at numbers that times by themselves- 3 x 3= 36. When we used the arrays to represent the numbers they would always be in a perfect square shape! See pictures below.
English
Here is a picture of our learning journey represented on our English working wall. These are all the activities we have got up to so far looking at the book 'The Promise'. We will be continuing looking at this next week, and doing some creative, descriptive writing.
ART
In our art lessons this week we have looked at our class artist; Banksy. First, we found out that Banksy likes to hide his identity, and do random graffiti pieces expressing his views and feelings. We found this really interesting.
We then looked at the different styles of graffiti writing Banksy does, and focused on the tag he leaves on some of his artwork.
We looked at two different graffiti styles; bubble writing and pointed. We had a go at doing both. We watched some YouTube tutorials to help us. Have a look below:
We then focused on the colours and shading of the graffiti writing. We noticed that they use lots of different techniques such as shading. They also make their writing stand our by using extremely bright colours. We had a go at doing our own tags, and using pastels on one, and paints on the other. We really tried to blend our colours together and make them stand out!
MERRY CHRISTMAS!!
What a fantastic term we have had! Everybody has put in so much effort and worked extremely hard since returning in September! We have all managed to adjust to the different things put in place to keep us safe as well as catching up with work we have missed. I am so proud of every single member of 5L! Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!! We definitely deserve a big rest!! Miss L x