Year 5 have been analyzing the text ‘Tuesday’ by David Wiesner. As the story is formed mainly from pictures, it has left lots of room for the children’s imagination to run wild and to develop some excellent writing as they flesh out the story with words.

Click on ‘read more…’ to watch an animated version of the story.  It inspired us to do a lot of drama to explore the different characters feelings and opinions. Learn more about this and watch our amazing video interviews…

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We have been working hard to learn all about Space, our solar system and the universe in Year 5. The children were set the challenge of creating a presentation for the rest of the class. They were allowed to choose either a planet or scientific phenomenon and they could present it in any way they saw fit. We had a range of fantastic models, posters, PowerPoints and models within posters which really explained the chosen area well.

I was particularly proud of just how much Year 5 have grown since last term in their understanding of what makes a good presentation and how best to involve your audience. Moreover, every time someone presented, we would give them both areas they could work on and parts that worked really well. The children were very perceptive but supportive to each other in this. We learnt some mind-blowing facts while having a thoroughly enjoyable and educational time!

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Year 5 had a fantastic start to the new mid-term with a range of powerful presentations from all of the students. The children were set the task of researching either the most important events in the Aztec timeline or the importance of  xocalatl to the Aztecs.

Everybody did a fantastic job of researching carefully, ensuring they understood what they were going to present and thinking of different ways to do just that! We had an Aztec temple, tried actual xocalatl -(the drink), tasted and discussed different chocolates and had lots of fun learning in the process!

We also had a great set of discussions afterwards on how we could improve our presentation skills for next time!  Well done, Turtles!

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Year 5 spent a fabulous two days in North and Middle Caicos and experienced an overnight stay as a class for the first time ever!

We had a busy and educational visit. We kayaked at Major Hill, looked at the devastation of a hurricane and the repair of the Middle Caicos Causeway. We visited Conch Bar caves and learnt about how they were used in the past and swam at Mudjin Harbour. We had a delicious dinner and breakfast at Pelican beach, thanks to Miss Susie and a good night’s rest after hide and seek.

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Last week, Year 5 were lucky to have been picked for the chance to make some delicious and nutritious ‘no bake’ cookies. The idea was ‘cooked’ up by the fabulous School Council and Miss Mani so that each year group have a chance for some fun in the kitchen before the end of the school year.

Mrs B designated the children all different jobs of blending and mixing, stirring and sharing and, needless to say, everyone had a lot of fun! What was so great was we didn’t need that hot oven on once and yet we ended up with fourteen really tasty, chewy, flavoursome and healthy cookies, full of good things including apple butter, apricots, dates, seeds and so much more!

Thank you so much to Mrs B for your patience and skills in the kitchen and great job School Council!  What a great snack to munch on as we peruse our new Scholastic book catalogue!

Year 5 , along with all the other classes in the school, have been preparing for our Maths Calculation  Showcase on Friday while having great fun exploring different areas of maths. We have got so into our ‘Maths Week’ children have been coming in with ‘psychic maths problems’ where they can guess the number you have in your head! Pretty impressive!

What was really nice to see was how we could all work together to create some giant graphs for us to plot information on for a line graph on Friday. It took some careful measuring and some good teamwork! We have also been having a great time, creating our own range of word problems based all around our topic ‘Lifesmart.’ We have thought carefully about the different operations involved and how to make an easy question turn into a more challenging one with more than one step or calculation. Why not come along on Friday and see if you can solve them!

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Give and Take
I give you dolphins that leap through the seas. You give me deforestation and wipe out the trees.
I give you lightning that powers your house. You give me traps that kill a gentle mouse.
I give you flowers that feed the bugs. You give me factories that make stupid mugs.
I give you land that is so grand. You mow it down and leave it quite bland.
I give you life with air and tree. You give me strife and care, but not for me.
I give you more than enough. You give me worse and worse.
I give you another chance. You give me excuse after excuse.

Written by one of our amazing 5 students (MC).

Year 5 are knee-deep in their new topic for this term- Life Smart which is all about making ‘life smart’ choices in life. We have started with the more obvious focus of healthy diet and exercise but later on in the term we will be looking at being ‘life smart’ in terms of happiness, emotional health and the health of our planet too.

We began by learning all about the different food groups and how we balance our meals in a day. We even did this in Spanish too! We have gone onto discovering what we can lack when we miss certain food groups and then branched into looking into food poetry using our five senses. This is a class poem we whizzed up in one lesson.  Each child has taken a line and described a food they enjoy with as much descriptive detail as they could.

As another angle, we have been investigating healthy baking and have already reduced sugar and fat in differing cookie recipes with amazing results. After taste testing them all, the firm class favourite, would you believe it, was the reduced fat cinnamon biscuit with almonds! We are definitely enjoying our progress in becoming ‘life smart’!

Recently in our Literacy classes, the Year 5s have been learning about persuasive techniques.  People use these skills to persuade others in different situations, for example, from children persuading their parents in their home life, to candidates in a presidential campaign! We have had fun making persuasive posters, selling different products.  We also created conversations to exchange items in shops.

We are now focusing on a very famous man and his very famous speech – Martin Luther King Junior. We spent a long time listening to his speech and looking for the persuasive techniques he used.  We discussed and wrote down how we felt listening to this speech and the issues it brought up.  We then thought about what we ‘have a dream’ about in terms of the world.  We had some really great discussions about this! We have now began to write our own powerful  ‘I have a dream..’ speeches,  thinking about what is really important to us and what we might like to change about the world.

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As we start a new school year, Year 5 have been getting their teeth into a brand new topic – Space, Segregation, the final frontier!  This involves a focus on Space exploration starting from the 1960s moon landing.  As we are looking at this period, we are also exploring what else was happening at that time with a particular focus on Martin Luther King and the effects of segregation.

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Year 5/6 have been learning about how we describe clothes in Spanish, with not only colour and size adjectives but also using qualitative adjectives too. The children have become so confident describing people and their clothes that we decided to have a mini-fashion show. During the show, the children described the clothes the models were wearing, adding some of their own opinions about them.

What is truly impressive is that the children all created and wrote their own part of the fashion show in Spanish, independently beforehand.  Moreover most of them were comfortable reading these parts out in front of a camera. What superb Spanish accents everyone!

As part of World Book day, Year 5/6 took on the challenge of working in teams to complete a specially designed non-fiction quiz. The quiz was organised to ensure the children had to think carefully about how a library references its books. They also had to focus on key words in each question to work out where they would find the answer. The children worked together superbly and used their solid understanding of how to approach a non-fiction book (using contents, glossary and index) to identify the page/s needed. It was a really close competition with teams finishing just seconds after each other!

We are learning all about Space in Year 5/6 and we decided to take on a bit of a challenge! The children were set the task of designing a lunar satellite model to understand how NASA actually collect data on exploratory missions, using these satellites.

The models had to be designed to very specific requirements to ensure they would be able to launch and also withstand crashes. They had to weigh no more than 100 grams in total with 10 grams of sensors, probes and cameras included. The children worked superbly well in their teams ‘Shooting Stars’, ‘Starstruck’ and ‘Star Wars Is Jealous!’

They spent time considering the best choices of material in terms of strength and weight and debated for a long time on how to best secure their satellite so that in a one metre drop test it would survive!  They also exchanged information amongst teams to confirm everyone was following the same rules, keeping the investigation a fair test.  We created some fabulous models!

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Year 5/6 got super festive in the last week of term and cooked up a storm… a snowstorm!

The children spent a careful two days creating their melting snowmen masterpieces. They started by making cookie dough which then had to be refrigerated overnight. Once chilled the children set about moulding their snow puddles and cutting some festive cookie shapes. Finally they were able to ice them and add the melting marshmallows before adding an array of chocolate chips and other decorations to create a crowd of Melting Snowmen.

I’m sure that you won’t be surprised to hear that they didn’t stay melting for long!

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Year 5/6 have been working hard since September learning all about the impact Martin Luther King had on how we live our lives today. We have studied his life and the sacrifices he made and how he carried this all out peacefully.

As we have been studying how people in the past affect the way our lives are shaped today, we decided to take on a challenge. The children were given the task of choosing someone in the past who they felt had made an important difference. They then had to use their imagination to present in a vivid and persuasive way their findings on their chosen person to the rest of the class.

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Year 5/6 had the great pleasure of spending some time with Kindergarten one Thursday afternoon and what an afternoon! Each Year 5/6 pupil ‘buddied’ up with a Kindergarten child and they then moved around a round-robin of activities. The children went from solving jigsaws to reading together to creating beautiful butterflies! It was a great learning experience for both age-groups.  Year 5/6 are always eager to spend some time with the younger children, they are a caring and thoughtful group and they don’t often see the Kindergarten with break and lunch timetables differing. This was a fantastic opportunity for the Year 5/6 children to not only practise patience and listening skills, but also to hone their teaching skills and perhaps most importantly make new friends! It was so interesting to see the interaction between each partnership and how positively the younger children responded to their older peers. It also took the Year5/6 back to their days in Kindergarten and lots of fond memories for all. We went away with big smiles and a keen interest from all the Year5/6 to return… and soon!

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