Willington Prep - Celebrating 140 years - 1885-2025

Year 5

We have had a really busy, but fun, first week back. The Christmas holiday feels like a distant memory!

The big topic of the week appears to have been the Victorians! In English, we have started our new class text Street Child and started to look at life in Victorian Britain for a young poor boy. We have also been focusing on important content to us in creative writing, including interesting sentence starters and 'show, don't tell'. In History, we compared how Britain had changed between the Viking topic we left last term and the Victorian period (which is our new topic of the half term!) and then took a brief look at Victorian inventions, life as a child and crime and punishment. We will be learning more about these over the next few weeks and we are excited to hear we are going on a trip next week to learn more about Victorian jobs and school. Mrs Wilkinson then helped us understand how people must have felt in the Victorian periods as we started our on our 'London Victorian voices' topic. We were given a variety of photos and used them as a stimulus for creating their own still images. We then added movement and dialogue to bring them to life.

In Maths, we began the week by learning about square and cube numbers. We then moved on to a quick review of prime numbers and practiced using factor trees to express numbers as a product of their prime factors. To end the week, we completed an NVR task with a focus on sequences. In Latin, Year 5 completed their posters of the floor plan of a Roman Public Baths. It was interesting to compare the different layouts of bath houses across the Roman Empire based on such careful research.

In Geography, we have started our new topic 'The World of Water', and we have been learning this week about how water is used within our homes and the water treatment process it goes through before making its way to us! Finally, in Science this week, we used a range of sources to find information about the planets in the solar system. We then focused on understanding why we have seasons in the UK. In Computing, we coded a program with on-screen buttons—one for each planet. When clicked, the picture of the planet changed.

Have a great weekend!

The Year 5 Team

THE WEEK AHEAD:
After school co-curricular programme begins