In honour of Children’s Mental Health Week, year 5 dedicated a full day of no screen activities for both our remote learners and children in school. We have had a fun filled day of creating sculptures inspired by Andy Goldsworthy, making our own hats that represent us, creating music and all round smiling and laughing all day.

Last week, we conducted a science experiment that helped us to understand the force buoyancy. We made different styled boats and tried to see how many coins it could hold. We had some sinkers at first, but we used this to help us build better boats which could hold many more coins.

This week at his been maths week and our children were greeted with a domino problem as soon as they walked through the door. We had to work hard to find the solution.
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As part of our Space topic last half term, we read the book Curiosity - The Story of a Mars Rover.

We loved the book and the story of the rover so much, that we decided to rewrite the story of its thrilling landing on Mars in our own words.  We also found a video of a simulation of the landing, so we recorded our descriptions as voice overs.  You can watch and listen to some of our videos below.

This week's work at High View has been based on 'My Many Coloured Days' by Dr Seuss.

As the text is all about emotions, the children wrote two separate diary entries about Lock Down - one with the negatives and one with the positives.  It was so lovely to hear how many wonderful things have come out of this tough time!

In PShCE, they thought about which colours represented which emotions for them. 

In Art, the children learned about Picasso and how his painting style changed throughout his life. They applied their work on colours and emotions from PSHCE, and chose shades and shapes to represent them, then created self-portraits in the Cubist style. 
​Can you recognise anybody?

In History, they looked at the vast number of important, historical events that have occurred in their short life times!  The created timelines to illustrate this.

This week's work has been based around 'Thud' by Nick Butterworth, and 'Jabberwocky' by Lewis Carroll. 'Jabberwocky' includes lots of nonsense words, but many of them are also portmanteau words (they are made from two real words put together, like 'chillax').  Y5 learnt that they didn't need to understand every word in order to understand a story / narrative poem.

Following instructions on YouTube, the children started the week by drawing and / or designing monsters that they would use to inform their writing later in the week.  Don't forget to click on the pictures to see them in their full glory!

After experimenting with powerful word choices, fronted adverbials and similes, the children wrote truly terrifying descriptions of their monsters!

Instead of a speed read this week, the children recorded themselves performing 'Jabberwocky'!

As part of their science work on Life Cycles, they produced diagrams of flowers, labelling the different parts and their roles.  Some even used real flowers!

This week's text for inspiration was The Dot by Peter H Reynolds.  I think for many of us, this has been our favourite book so far.  Below is a small selection of the tasks the children have completed.

Y5 completed lots of dotty artwork in many different ways with lots of different media!

In Science, the children could start to grow potatoes using a potato, or they could choose other kitchen scraps to grow food from.  We cannot wait to see them as they grow more!

The little girl in this week's story creates an art exhibition completely based on dots.  Y5 loved her work so much that they wrote reviews of her exhibition!  They used their "magpieing" skills to steal ideas from an example text.  We also used a colour thesaurus to help us describe her work.  I was absolutely blown away by the standard of their writing!  I wish there was space on here to share it all!  Here is just a small (ok, quite large) selection for you.

This week, High View were inspired by the book 10 Things I Can Do To Help My World.

In Y5, we watched and read a speech by teenage environmental campaigner Greta Thunberg. 

The children wrote and performed their own speeches, which are aimed at convincing the people of Wombwell to take better care for the environment. They really did blow us away with their empathy and passion, as well as their brilliant research and use of emotive language.  We definitely have some future "Gretas" among our Y5 cohort!

After five very very busy weeks of home learning, all of our children are ready for a well deserved half term break next week!

Yet another week of Y5 astounding us, this time with their hidden talents!  Our work was based around the book "Somebody Swallowed Stanley", which inspired us to think about the impact of plastic pollution and recycling.

The writing task this week was to create a poem, rap or song about the environment, focusing on plastic pollution.  The work really blew us away and put tears of pride in our eyes yet again!

Of course, all this writing needed research to get there!

In Design and Technology, Y5 designed and made kites!  I think most of them are waiting for a good windy day when they can fly them (following social distancing rules, obviously).

​Y5 have been loving using Mr Crossley's PE videos on YouTube, plus adding a few ideas of their own!

There was super problem solving work in maths...

...and comprehension in reading!

Finally, our optional tasks were really popular this week - children designed posters and reusable shopping bags, and created stunning art out of rubbish!