Year 5 have had excellent focus during our Art lessons. They have shown great resilience and determination to produce a piece of art to the best of their ability by reflecting on their work and making improvements. 

This week, Year 5 have shown a great ability of working as a team for various tasks. In English, we have been considering the structure of stories and we have used drama to explore characters and setting. We had an interactive RE lesson where we went hunting in pairs to find clues about our religion of the term which is Sikhism. Science was really exciting as we dissected flowers and looked more closely at the parts using the microscopes. On Wednesday, it was our first music session with an outside agency. We were taught about warming up our voices and started to learn 'Puff the Magic Dragon'. 

Year 5 have been working with different resources and taking our learning beyond writing in our books. Our Geography lesson this week was to locate rivers from around the world and we learnt how to use atlases to find the information we needed. In Science, we learnt about how plants can reproduce in different ways. To help us to understand the different processes, we took our learning outside. Some of us were amazed to find out that some plants can reproduce with only one parent plant. We have taken cuttings of mint to clone our own plants and we will be monitoring them over the coming weeks to see if we are successful. Fingers crossed we will be coming home with some lovely mint that our families can use for some yummy dinners! You could ask us to tell you about the different types of reproduction processes in plants or what the word 'clone' means.

In Geography we used sand and water to imitate rivers. We had to investigate the statement 'Rivers never run in a straight line'. It was really interesting to make observations and then carry out our own further investigations. Over the last couple of weeks we have really been focusing on descriptive techniques and some SPaG that is new to us. We have applied these skills into our own stories based on 'Honey I shrunk the kids'. We have continued to learn more songs during our singing sessions on Wednesday afternoons and are possibly the loudest singers at Water Lane!

Unfortunately, we were not successful with the cloning of our mint cuttings however we aren't ones to be defeated in Year 5. We have now got new mint cuttings to have a second attempt and Miss Donnelly suggested we try re-growing spring onions. We cut the onions to 3 cm and have placed them in water- fingers crossed we get the outcome we hope for this time!

Also this week, we have expanded our Spanish vocabulary bank and used this new knowledge to build conversations. In English, we have moved onto a new unit of information texts but instead of a fact file we are going to aim to write and record our own documentaries using David Attenborough as our inspiration!

The update on the spring onions is that we have seen success! We did take another cutting from a new mint plant too but we are still waiting to see if we have been successful with that.

Our book for guided reading this half term has been Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Some of us have read the book or seen the story but we have all enjoyed sharing the story together. 

In RE, we were learning about Sikh celebrations and acted out the events that take place. Do you know how Sikh babies are named? Ask Year 5 to find out!

For Black History Month, we learnt about four incredible women who worked for NASA and played a huge part in the Space Race. We were really inspired by the impact that they have had on history.