Willington Prep - Celebrating 140 years - 1885-2025

Year 5

What a busy first full week back it’s been in Year 5!

In History, we’ve been exploring why the earliest English kingdoms in the Anglo-Saxon period had such changeable borders. Through our Conquest game, we were fascinated to learn that even something like changing your religious beliefs could invite a rival tribe to invade! In Geography, we’ve been thinking carefully about how we can recycle more and investigating what companies are doing to make their products more reusable. We’ve also launched our first mini-project of the term: creating our own pop-up information books on sustainability. We’ll be adding a new page each week and are so excited to see these take shape - we can’t wait to share our finished books with you in a few weeks’ time!

In Latin, we are using our first 2 lessons to recap chapters 1-6 of our Minimus text book. We reminded ourselves of verb endings and agreement of nouns and adjectives according to gender, which will be really important as we continue to the end of the book. At the start of this week, we have written a narrative story based from a picture. Then we started reading High Rise Mystery and enjoyed building the details about the characters we have learned about. Additionally, we have learned about relative clauses and used them in our first Reading Journal entry.

In Maths, we’ve been revising place value and working with some impressively large numbers! We practised writing numbers in both words and digits, counting forwards and backwards in powers of ten or their multiples, and rounding numbers to the nearest 10, 100, 1,000, 10,000 and even 100,000.

In PSHCEE, we began by looking at the topics we’ll cover this year. We also discussed how to create a positive classroom environment and explored some key terms that will support our learning throughout the course. In Drama, we focused on developing our skills in body language and mime. We began with an “emotions freeze-frame” warm-up before exploring different character walks. Working in small groups, pupils then created mime performances based on given scenarios, using gesture, posture, facial expression and levels to communicate meaning without words.

In French, we have been learning French greetings and how to meet people, putting our knowledge into practice through fun role plays. We have also started using the pronouns je (I) and tu (you) in simple sentences. We are very excited to begin working with our new textbooks and exercise books - a fantastic start to French this term! Finally, in Science this week, we thought about what it means to work scientifically. We explored different types of investigations, such as observing over time, fair tests, pattern seeking, surveys, research and classifying. We looked at some real life examples and had to decide which type of investigation was being used in each case. In computing, we refreshed our text formatting skills in Google Docs, making sure we are ready to use these skills confidently in our other subjects.

Have a wonderful weekend!

The Year 5 Team

THE WEEK AHEAD:

Monday 15th September: