Thank you to everyone who came to view our Art Show exhibition. We hope you found it thought-provoking. All of the teachers across Year 5 have been really impressed with how the classes have engaged and responded to this unit of learning, which isn’t the easier topic to understand and digest. They have approached it with sensitivity and compassion. This is what makes us ACE.

We’re two weeks into our Refugee unit of learning and the depth of response and emotional understanding children have explored through this unit so far has really made me proud. Today, we finished our collage artwork and free-write poetry based on Benjamin Zephaniah in preparation for our Refugee Week art show next week.

5H have wowed me this week with their final hot-writes about an ancient wardrobe… This was part of our portal story where we focused on suspense and description of an item, exploring features such as personification to bring this ominous or magical item to life. Here are some examples!

As part of our Mental Health Week, Miss Peartree created an emoji treasure hunt for us to complete, based on our emotion boards in school. We loved how practical this was and then, afterwards, we took our completed sheets and worked on discussing some solutions to scenarios where emotional literacy is required. Here are some action shots!

Today, we got our teeth stuck into the chronology of the Ancient Egyptians. The children were given dateless timeline images without an order to them and they had to historically reason with what they already know, comparing two facts against each other to work out what came first. Afterwards, we were Egyptologists, looking at secondary source artefacts. We took part in a silent debate to decipher and predict what we thought each artefacts’ material and purpose was. Here’s some action shots!

We had an amazing VR workshop this week to kick off our Ancient Egyptian’s unit. David, our workshop leader, talked us through a series of settings and the distinctive features of each. Some key vocabulary we learnt from the session was: antechamber, burial chamber, hieroglyphics and canopic jars.

This is a response to learning about the Montgomery bus boycott, as part of our ACE Historian unit. The themes explored in the lesson are around racial segregation, inequality, discrimination, non-violent protests and hostility.

After learning, the children were tasked to represent what they have learnt through abstract art: colour, movement and shapes. These are some examples of the responses:

This half term we have been exploring Space and beyond! Within this, we have learnt about the orbit and rotation of the Earth around the Sun. In addition to this, we have explored the role of the Moon, as well as the orbital periods of the other planets in our Solar System. We set up a fair test investigation, theorising how we can prove that the Earth rotates on its axis 24 hours a day, through measuring and using compasses to mark the direction of shadows throughout one day, hour-by-hour. This week, we will conduct our investigation and use the results to analyse whether we can prove or disprove our hypotheses. Hopefully we get a sunny day!

Wow, well.. what can I say! Macbeth is officially over and what an amazing experience we had. Last week, performing at the Carriageworks, was such a special time for everybody. The awe and wonder on 5H’s faces when they entered the auditorium for the first time is something that I wish I could’ve captured. Their professionalism, enthusiasm and teamwork during the day was outstanding. I couldn’t be prouder of them! We are awaiting the photography from the night but, in the meantime, here is a video of one of our dress rehearsals.

Today, some of our Y5s attended a Drama workshop with the actors from the theatre company ‘Wrongsemble’. They are a Leeds-based company and offered us a session to explore and consolidate Macbeth. It was wonderful timing, given our performances are next week and the children loved it. The teachers also commented on how brilliant the actors were and how enthused our pupils were. We will definitely be exploring using Wrongsemble again in the future for workshops and performances in school!