With half term fast approaching and a week of activities to plan, it would be amazing if the children could get into a habit of logging onto Timestable Rockstars regularly. The ‘Soundcheck’ function will test all of their times tables against the clock and provide the teachers with invaluable data as to where your child needs support.

We are delighted to have added Charlie Mackesy’s bestseller to our class and school library. This week, the children have been encouraged read it and share their thoughts about their own emotions. We are looking forward to discussing the hidden meanings and messages behind each of the characters over the next week.

The class made observations about the appearance of the food using appropriate descriptive language. After tasting the breads, feta, houmous and olives they recorded their observations in preparation for designing their own Greek food!

This morning the Kestrels enjoyed a muddy session with Ian. The class were given several pieces of guttering and a ping pong ball. Ian placed a bucket a few metres away and set them the challenge of moving the ball along the guttering from him to the bucket, without touching it or dropping it!

The emphasis was on team work and communication. Initially, the class dropped the ball a few times and were rushing to complete the task. When they began to talk and listen to each other, they travelled further towards the bucket. At last they made it and were quite pleased with themselves.

In Science, Year 5 have been developing their understanding of day and night. They have learnt all about orbits and how light travels. We also discussed why the moon appears to changes shape during its orbit around the earth.

At the end of the lesson they created a graph, consisting of sunrises and sunsets relating to cities around the UK.

Ask them to explain to you why the times change according to your relative position on the globe.

Today, Year 5 carried out their light experiment to explain why shadows change length during the day. They made predictions based on what they had learned in previous lessons and gathered results based on their observations.

Today, the Kestrels performed the poem ‘The Kestrel’ by Wilfred Wilson Gibson for National Poetry Day. They performed the poem, which consisted of 5 verses, to the whole school without any prompts or words.

This week in Science, the children have been learning about how our solar system works. They learnt how the planets orbit the sun and came up with their own explanation of how our solar system functions.

Last week, Year 5 designed and built their own bottle rockets.

They were set the challenge of creating an attachment that allowed their shuttles to detach from the fuselage mid flight. In the afternoon, we were able to test out how successful these attachments were.

Today Year 5 learnt all about the planets in our solar system, their relative sizes in relation to other planets and their distances from the Sun.

The children also learn a mnemonic to remember the order of planets in terms of their distance from the Sun.