To celebrate Languages Day Y5 explored the Greek alphabet. We learnt that we use lots of Greek words in English today. Some say there are over 150,000 English words that come from Greek words! Once we learnt the Greek alphabet we used it to have fun cracking linguistic codes. When we joined up with our Y2 buddies we taught them how to write their name using the Greek alphabet and then used what we had learnt to play hangman.
Y5 were inspired by the artist Hundertwasser this half term and created pictures of nature in his style. Hundertwasser often depicted tress as lollipops and the children’s designs focused on this.
To create our pieces we used oil pastels practicing and perfecting the following different techniques: mixing and blending, stippling and cross-hatching.
To launch our new history topic, Ancient Greeks. Y5 had a day of cooking. We prepared and cooked Melomakarona (which are Greek honey-spice cookies), chicken kebabs with roasted vegetables and tzatziki dip and a Greek salad. The children worked tirelessly in the kitchen all morning to prepare this wonderous feast. In the afternoon we wrote up our recipes with a detailed method including modal and imperative verbs.
Finally, once all the work was done we sat down and ate all of the wonderful food that was prepared.
We sent four of our young mathematicians to represent Queen’s Hill at a county wide mathematics challenge, held at Norwich School.
They were given a set of letters and numbers and worked through the ‘equations’ allocating the letters values. They then attempted to make the total indicated using six values provided while only using the four operations. The final challenge was to solve questions to test their lateral thinking and problem solving.
All four of them worked extremely hard and represented Queen’s Hill with pride – we are so proud of them!
We sent four of our young mathematicians to represent Queen’s Hill at a county wide mathematics challenge, held at Norwich School.
Working in pairs the mathematicians worked through five problems during an eight minute period at each station. The activities involved problems such as:
Pentominoes ~ Tangrams ~ Railway timetables ~ Ordering playing cards ~ Dice ~ Mystery numbers ~ Domino jigsaw ~ Shopping lists ~ Mazes ~ Code breaking ~ Sequences ~ Broken calculators ~ Make 24 ~ Logic puzzles ~ Cross numbers.
All four of them worked extremely hard and represented Queen’s Hill with pride. They competed with courage and placed Queen’s Hill in the top 20! Even commenting that they would come back next year and compete for Y6 – we are so proud of them!
This week in maths Y5 continue to build on their knowledge of ‘scaling’. At the end of the week children got to move around the classroom, visiting four different stations. At each station children had to demonstrate using scaling language comparing mass, time, volume and length.
They did amazingly well and they have now applied that knowledge to multiplying by fractions!
This week in outdoor learning children went for a walk and found an assortment of treasures: grasses, flowers, leaves, buds, and sticks. They came back together and created faces out of the treasures they found.
We started the half term exploring how to work out area. Initially, we looked at the best way to measure surfaces using different shapes and made estimations using our finger tips. We moved onto counting squares and worked out the area of our names by drawing them on squared paper. Then we made a 1m x 1m stencil and went out onto the playground with chalk and created our own compound shapes – though the weather was not kind to us that day!
Once children were confident working out area counting squares we introduced the calculation length x width. Children were then able to work out the area of rectangles and compound shapes using this calculation. Finally, working in groups they used their knowledge of area to reason and problem solve.
This half term we have been reading the story ‘The Explorer’ by Katherine Rundell. It has been an inspiring book to our young writers and they have produced some amazing work.
They were disgusted to hear about the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest so wrote persuasive letters to the Brazilian Ambassador to encourage him to stop the clearing of the rainforest. We got so immersed in the story that the children wrote a descriptive setting piece about their own journey through the Amazon, concentrating on using their five senses. Finally, we ended the term on writing diamante poems about some of the animals we met in the story so far.
We created artwork inspired by Chris Ofili’s ‘Paradise by Night’ painting. We used popcorn kernels, rice, split peas and different painting techniques to incorporate texture into our work.
