Year 5

Welcome to our Week 2 newsletter!

We had a really exciting end to our second week, with our Victorian day trip to the Holly Lodge centre, Richmond Park. It was such a fun day! We started the morning with a snack in the park, then we experienced a morning at Mrs Sawyer's Victorian school. The teacher was very strict and we had to use chalk and slates to hone our handwriting skills. After a quick picnic outside for lunch, we played some Victorian games and then went to work training as a pharmacists apprentice. We learnt how to extract the medicinal elements of herbs, before learning how to turn this into medicine. It was really interesting to learn about what all of the different coloured bottles stood for. We are really looking forward to putting what we have learnt into our work next week. Mrs Draper said we are going to use our knowledge to design a Victorian board-game - the Game of Life c.1837!

In English this week we have planned, written and edited a diary recount as though we are Jim in Street Child, using facts as well as opinions to describe the first 24 hours of the story. We particularly enjoyed the drama elements of our lessons to bring these events to life. This went really well with our Drama lesson where we explored the working life for Victorian children and created still images of children in coal mines, sweeping chimneys, workhouses and as maids. We thought about the poor conditions that children were often made to work under. We then created an improvised scene of a day in the workhouse, including meal times, working on the factory machines and sleeping arrangements. Miss Wilkinson and Miss Fraser even presented us with some rather unappetising-looking 'Willington gruel' at the end of the lesson. Suffice to say, there were no takers!

In Geography, our new topic is Water World, and we were set a skills mini-challenge to name the oceans and seas of the world on our maps using an atlas, before working our on explanation skills by writing detailed explanations of the different reasons communities live near water. In Latin we translated a story about a visit to the doctor. We then studied a photograph of the implements a Roman doctor would have used. The hook to pull out your tonsils (without anaesthetic!) seemed a bit gruesome! We learnt the names of several parts of the body, in preparation for creating a piece of drama about visiting the doctor. So far we have started writing our scripts in pairs (all in Latin!), and next week we will rehearse and hopefully have time to perform to our classmates. 

In Maths, we have been working on the four operations with whole numbers and working on expressing the remainder of a division calculation as a fraction. Finally, in French, we’ve started a new topic about family and friends. This includes learning how to talk about brothers and sisters, as well as other family members. We have also been practising the verb avoir in the present tense and using possessive adjectives such as mon, ma, mes (my) and ton, ta, tes (your) in sentences. 

Have a great weekend!

The Year 5 Team