Perfect Pandas

 Newsletter – Autumn 1

Welcome back to a new academic year!

A warm welcome from the Year 5 team - Miss Ireland, Miss Stewart, Mr Minton and Mrs Mills.  We hope that you all had a great summer holiday and the children are raring to go and keen to start Year 5.  We are sure that this year will be a positive one filled with lots of learning and fun.

We kick start this year, with a new topic based on the Anglo Saxons and the Vikings – Saxon Shores and the Vicious Vikings!  In this topic we will be exploring how places changed after the Saxon invasion, delve into Saxon beliefs and discover what everyday life was like for the Anglo-Saxons.  We will then whizz through history to the Vikings and learn all about Viking raids and settlements.  To kick start this unit of work, the children will be learning the runic alphabet used by the Anglo Saxons to send secret messages and to create their very own wooden bookmarks.

To help us develop the children’s reading skills, we would like to ask you to hear your child read for a minimum of 20 minutes, 4 times a week and sign their reading record.  This can be their class book or a book from their Lexiled reading list, which can be found by logging into Reading Pro.  We appreciate your support with this as we know how busy life can be, but those extra reading sessions will help your child to achieve their highest potential.  As a reward for reading regularly, each child will be awarded a sticker each week if they have read 4 times to an adult (not including this week!).  When the children have achieved 48 stickers, then they will be awarded with their 48 reads Reading Band during celebration assembly!  You can do it Perfect Pandas! Children who have earned a reading band are allowed to wear this during school time. We are beginning the Reading Challenge week beginning 13^th September.

Targets:

Reading

Science

Homework

Your child will receive homework every Friday to be handed in the following Wednesday.  All homework will be added to Teams each week and should also be handed into Teams by the Wednesday deadline.

Spellings will be handed out on a Friday to be tested the following Friday.  The expectation is that they will get 5 or 6 correct every week. 

Coming soon, on TEAMS, will be a copy of the words that children need to spell correctly in Years 5 & 6.  Some of these will be set for the spelling tests, but you may want to work through them with your child as they will need to use them in their writing during Years 5 and 6.

Water Bottles & PE Kit

Children are encouraged to bring drinks bottles to school with water so they can have a drink in class.

This half term, outdoor PE will be on a Monday afternoon and indoor on a Friday afternoon. Please ensure your child comes to school in their PE kit on these days.  Long hair must be tied back and earrings should be removed.

If you have any questions or if there is anything we can do to help then please do not hesitate to ask.

Miss Stewart, Miss Ireland, Mr Minton and Mrs Mills

Persevering Penguins Newsletter – Summer Term 1 2021

I hope everyone has had a great Easter and enjoyed some family time together. We are back for the summer term in what has been another strange year.

This half term our topic will be focused on rivers and geographical features and will look at Matlock Baths. In this geography-driven topic we will learn about parts of a river and we will explore some of the main vocabulary connected with this topic (source, stream, tributaries, etc).

In English, we will start the term by looking at different types of poetry and then move onto persuasive writing. .

Our Maths lessons will focus on decimals,

Microsoft Teams

Homework can continue to be posted on  dojo. I will also continue to put a brief learning overview on Teams each week for any child that needs to work remotely due to self-isolating. If there is ever any work or instruction that you don’t understand, please send me a message so I can try and make it clearer.

PE

Our PE days are Tuesdays and Thursdays. Please make sure that your child comes to school in their P.E kit on these days. Please make sure they are wearing the correct PE kit. At the moment we will all be doing PE outside wherever possible. Please make sure your child brings a warm tracksuit top/hoodie and tracksuit bottoms if it is a particularly cold day.

Targets:

Reading:

• Reading books at an age appropriate level (within the year 4 Lexile Range)
• I can take note of punctuation when reading aloud.
• I can discuss my understanding of the text.

We will listen to children read in school in a variety of situations. We will still not be sending home school reading books at this time. All children will have a book to read in school. The expectation will be that parents listen to children read their own books at home at least 3 times per week. Children will not be bringing home a school reading book at this current time.  You can continue to access online Scholastic Reading Pro at home as well. Your child will need to continue using their reading record at home (if you need a new one, please let me know) but this will remain at home for now. Every two weeks, I’ll restart the ‘reading record check’ and will ask you to take a photo of their reading record logs to share with me. This is just so I can try and keep track of who has been reading at home.

Science:

• I can classify animals into groups.
• I can identify invertebrates.
• I can identify the seven different life processes.
• I can describe environmental dangers to endangered species.

Homework

Your child will continue to receive homework every Friday to be handed in by the following Wednesday. Maths and English homework books should already be at home. The expectation will continue to be that as soon as your child has done their homework please send in a photo of the completed page(s) and upload to dojo.  Please send me a message if there are any issues with this or if there is an activity your child has found difficult and, where possible, we will follow this up in class. 

I have already uploaded the week-by-week spellings for this half term onto Teams so that you can see which spellings we are working on each week. This is also the same for our weekly times tables , which was posted out earlier on dojo. We will be having spelling tests every Friday based on these words. Spelling books will go home on Friday night so that you can see how your child has done in the test but these must come back to school with your child on a Monday morning. We will also be having a times tables test every Friday on a specific times table each week.

If you have any questions or if there is anything I can do to help then please do not hesitate to ask.            

Kind regards Mr Fidler