Welcome to Life at KPS for Year 5

Mrs Van Rooyen and Mrs Sharma warmly welcome you to Year 5.

The aim of this page is to highlight some of the fantastic learning that has been happening in Year 5, this page will be updated monthly, with photographs and information about the learning we have completed during the month.

We hope you enjoy looking through these updates and do discuss your child’s learning with them to celebrate their success. We look forward to any suggestions you may have to make your child’s learning a pleasant experience.

January 2022

Arts

We have spent some time at the start of the term finishing off our masks for the Brazilian Carnival. We researched and designed these masks to make sure they look like authentic carnival masks…and they definitely do! Our masks look amazing!

We have now started looking into our new topic: Roman Coil Pots. In our first couple of lessons we have focussed on great clay coil pot artists and the history of ceramics. We also looked at existing designs to gain some ideas of what we can do. We can’t wait to design and make our own coil pots!

Computing

This term, we have been looking at website design. Firstly, we were looking at features of a website and learnt how to evaluate a website against these features. We also looked at what makes a ‘bad’ website and a ‘good’ website. We compared two different webpages and was surprised to know that some websites have so much information that the user can easily feel lost! We are going to use Power Point to create a mini-website and will be learning about creating links in the document, which will be similar like webpages, but also to outside webpages. Some of us already started at home with a similar task! We can’t wait to create our Roman mini-webpages.

English

In English this term, we focus on report writing and use our Topic, the Romans to do this. We love the Romans and learnt already so much! We first started making notes by watching some really interesting videos on the Romans in general, the daily life, the life of a soldier, Roman children and much more! We have been practising our grammar such as: fronted adverbials, subordinate clauses, relative clauses, expanded noun phrases and some Alan Peat sentences too. We can’t wait to write our report with all our researched facts!

History

We have been learning about the Romans and some of the prominent Roman leaders. We have also been learning about the Roman Empire and we were surprised to know how many countries the Romans had invaded. It was interesting to know that the Romans used communal baths and that they liked to be clean. Did you know they used a tool called a strigil to ‘scrape’ themselves clean? We also learnt that the Romans invented many things such as: concrete, books, newspapers, calendars, socks and even central heating too!

Maths

In Maths we have been working on Multiplication. We took small steps and started with the Y4 method of 3-4 digits times 1 digit. We then moved on to looking at formal methods of multiplication (column method) and children progressed on to 2-3 digits multiplied by 2-digit numbers. The more we practised the more children became confident in these questions. We then tried some challenge multiplications going on to 4-5 digits multiplied by 2 digits. We have also started the subtopic of formal methods in division. Children in Year 5 are now becoming experts in the ‘bus stop’ method!

Music

This month, year 5 have been linking their music work to their topic on the Romans.

They have learnt to sing songs related to Romans including ‘Just like a Roman’ and the ‘Road Building’ Song

The children have also been learning about Roman fanfares. They’ve talked about instrumentation and rhythm used and have composed their own on chime bars using ‘ C E and G’

Panjabi

In Year 5 this term, we have been learning the 6 sets of Panjabi letters and revising their previous learning by reading and writing words with different symbols. For speaking and listening our main focus has been on different seasons. Children are learning about different seasons in Panjabi and how the weather changes according to the seasons. They are also learning new vocabulary about weather through their experiences.  Children are making posters and drawing pictures of different seasons in their books and sharing their learning with the class. We are also learning about Chali Mukte (Forty Liberatores) in Panjabi.

Physical Education

Children in Y5 have been learning to play Hockey.  They have been practicing the skills needed to play the sport by taking part in stick and ball dribbling drills designed to improve control of the ball and hockey stick.

Fitness is a key factor when playing Hockey so we have been taking part in strenuous warm ups which have also helped warm us up in this cold weather!  We have learnt the correct way to hold the Hockey stick as well as run with the stick while keeping ourselves and those around us safe.

Children will be working on quick footwork skills and teamwork to improve on their game play.  These skills are transferable to many other team and individual sports and we w

PSHE

This term in PSHE, we have been focussed on emotions, in particular anger and how to deal with this emotion. We discussed what things can make us angry and why these situations occur. It was important that we know what to do when we are angry and how to control our anger. We looked at different strategies and solutions which can help us deal with these emotions in the playground. We also looked at different scenarios and thought about how the characters could have dealt with their anger differently.

Religious Education

We continued with the topic of Christianity and explored Epiphany.  Epiphany celebrates the end of the twelve days of Christmas.

Epiphany – also known as Three Kings’ Day – is a Christian festival, which starts on 6 January.

It is a special date in the Christmas story as it’s when people celebrate how a star led the Magi – also known as the Three kings or the Wise Men – to visit the baby Jesus after he had been born.

‘Epiphany’ comes from the Greek word meaning ‘to reveal’, as it is when the baby Jesus was ‘revealed’ to the world.

Science

In science,  we have been learning about materials. We started with the states of matter and agreed that all materials are made of matter. We also know that there are in some materials particles packed more closely together than in other materials. We also looked at the hardness of materials and put some materials on a scale of hardness 1-5. This scale is called Moh’s scale. We also looked at solids and answer the question: Is all solids always solid? In our next lesson, we looked at liquids and conducted a fair test on various liquids. We called it a ‘liquid race’ and we compared four different substances: shampoo, syrup, Nando’s Peri Peri and Fairy Liquid. We feel more confident in knowing how to conduct a fair test!

Sikh Studies

This term in Sikh Studies children have been learning about the Martyrdom of the 9^th Guru, Sri Guru Tegh Bahadhur Ji. Children learnt the background of the story of the 9^th Guru and the reasons for the Martyrdom. Then they watched a short animation which showed the scene from the viewpoint of the crowds that were watching at the time. Children then had to write either a letter to Guru Gobind Singh as the 9-year-old son explaining what happened to their Father, or as a diary entry of what they saw on that day of the Martyrdom.