Welcome back!

Welcome back to school  - I hope that you all had a lovely summer and are refreshed and rejuvenated for another fantastic year. Your penultimate year at Haddon will be busy, but will be full of exciting learning and adventures, from our residential trip to Hathersage coming up at the end of September, to visits from specialists and in-class activities. I'm really looking forward to teaching every one of you again and know that we will make this year as memorable as last year!

Enquiry

This term our enquiry question will be: ”Is there one rule for everyone?”. We will be finding out about the arrival of the Anglo Saxons and the effect they had on Britain, both in the past and how their presence has left a legacy on life in Britain today, including our traditions, place names and even our legal system. We will also discover the impact of the Vikings, as well as discovering how people lived over 1,000 years ago.  To do this, we will need to think about what Britain was like before the invaders arrived and what caused things to change. We will investigate how people lived and how some of the choices they made over a thousand years ago are still visible today.

Maths

Maths in Year 5 begins with learning about place value, before spending time practising mental and written methods for addition and subtraction. We will then spend a significant block of time on multiplication and division, learning and rehearsing written methods involving numbers up to 4-digits. It is important that we maintain fluency in times tables, and regular practise at home using Times Table Rockstars will certainly support this. We will end the term by investigating how to measure volume.

English

This term, we will use the fantastic series “How to Train Your Dragon” by Cressida Cowell as our inspiration, which will tie in with our Enquiry work on Vikings. The books and film will provide inspiration for writing narrative, instructional texts and persuasive writing. In the course of our lessons, we will be working improving grammar, focussing on writing detailed complex sentences, using relative clauses and fronted adverbials. We will also be learning spelling rules supported by Spelling Shed, a great resource to use at home. This week, each child has selected a book banded book and a free choice reader to bring home. Please do discuss their books with them and, where possible, listen to them read.

Science

In our Science lessons we will start the term by learning about Forces, including air and water resistance, friction and gravity. This will allow us to carry out a number of practical investigations and will lead into our second Science focus, on the Earth and Space. We will be finding out about the movement of the planets in the solar system and how the Sun, Earth and Moon all interact.

Support staff

Once again, we are fortunate to have Miss Hallam and Mrs Wilson helping in the classroom, providing support during lessons as well as with small group interventions. This year we will be joined by Miss Lee every Thursday, who is a familiar face having been the Year 4 midday supervisor last year. She is a real asset and much loved by the children. Finally, Miss Hutsby will also be working in Year 5 this term. Miss Hutsby is beginning her journey as a teacher and has made a fabulous start already in the few days since the beginning of the academic year. She has already commented on how lucky she is to be working with such wonderful children!