This term our art topic has had us looking into the world of installation art. This style has artists filling an open space in a variety of different ways. Some artists choose to use sculptures to represent a story, whereas others use projections and videos to immerse those who go to witness the experience!

Our new class book for this half term is a firm favourite of mine, "Stig of the Dump". The book is a classic tale and the children have loved reading it so far. 

We are only 1 chapter in and the children are hooked already!

This Half term, we have been learning about Baghdad and the Middle East in our Humanities lessons (which are a mix of history and geography). The children have been really enjoying learning about the Markets of Baghdad and we wrote stories about a day trip to the markets. 

We then learnt about the currency people used. 

There were two main Islamic coins used in trade. The dinar was a gold coin, and the dirham was a silver coin. 

We looked at pictures of the Dinar coins and used clay to replicate them. Keep checking back on our page as once the clay is dry, the children will be painting their clay coins gold!

To finish our Asia topic, we spent some time investigating different structures of buildings in countries who are prone to Earthquakes. Using spaghetti and marshmallows, we learnt that the triangular structures were more secure.

This term, we were lucky enough to go to the National Space Centre in Leicester. The children were invited to a mars rover workshop where we programmed our own mars rovers to complete instructions and dodge obstacles. 

We also enjoyed an exciting planetarium show where we learnt all the things astronauts do to get ready for space. This inspired some excellent, quality writing at the end of term.

Our favourite day of the year came around this week. The children were so excited to come to school dressed as their book character of choice.

As always, some of the costumes were amazing and we want to thank parents for their support with this event.

Our afternoon activity

The children were tasked with creating a pop up version of the character they had come dressed as (or someone else's if they were inspired). 

They decorate the inside pages with their favourite parts of the book they'd chosen. Then, they re-created the front cover and wrote a blurb to describe the book in their own words. 

Here's an example of an almost finished book.

The new Disney film Encanto has certainly been a hit with Year 5. So much so that we decided to base our writing from it this week.

We wrote an acrostic poem from the title of the film and explored the thoughts and feelings of one of the most complex members of the Madrigal family. 

Our Spanish teacher Senior Ruiz helped us to understand some of the Spanish words within the film and the children loved the chance to sing some of the songs in Spanish too!

Here you can read of the children's acrostic poems close up.