Welcome 5SW

Welcome to our class web page where you can find out about our amazing learning journey. You will find

information about our activities, examples of our work and comments from us! Please visit often to see our learning journey develop.

Key information 

5SW have outdoor PE on a Tuesday and indoor PE on a Thursday. 
 

Drop off and collection is at the front of the school by Reception. 
 

Children are encouraged to read for pleasure at least 3 times a week and complete TT Rock stars frequently. Maths homework is set on a Friday on google classroom but hard copies are always available if you have technical issues. 

Term 5

Learning to change the world! This term there will be a huge focus on Global goal 4: quality education.  We will be answering the question: WHY ARE SOME CHILDREN PREVENTED FROM GOING TO SCHOOL? Through our enquiry, reading and writing we will be looking at inspirational speakers like Malala, who fought for girls’ rights to education. We will be geographers to study how location, natural disasters and poverty also answer our question.  We can’t wait to get started so that we can spread the word and make education fair for all.  

Being Artists

This term we will be looking at several inspirational people who stand up for others and make a difference to our world.  Because our end product will use mixed media, we spent the afternoon exploring different media to evaluate its effectiveness. Although messy, we had lots of fun and our creativity flowed. 

TERM 4

This term we will be continuing to be scientists learning about forces and the earth and beyond.  We will be exploring the wonderful world of Pandora also. We will be traveling 4 light years away to discover life forms there. As writers, we look forward to writing journals all

about our brand new discoveries. 

Being Scientists

Our ambition

We made it!! After weeks of team work, research and rehearsals, we finally were able to show off everything we know about what makes earth earth! We dimmed the lights, closed the blinds and got out our torches to submerge our parents, grandparents and carers into a wealth of scientific knowledge. We had so much fun and we’d like to thank everyone  who visited our exhibition, joined in with our games and asked lots of questions. Thank you. 

Being scientists! Explorer Dome visit

Today we had an incredibly exciting morning in Year 5!

We had Dave from the Explorer Dome visit us!

The Explorer Dome was a mobile planetarium, set up in our school hall, that allowed 5SW to travel into space to get a close up of the planets.

We learned about the planets as individuals with their key characteristics and facts! As well as the different moons (Europa) and the tricks to spot the constellations and North Star!

Dave also presented a star show! To represent how many stars are in the galaxy.

We demonstrated our excellent oracy skills to Dave in the questions we asked and how we responded to each other, building and challenging on ideas.

Thank you Explorer Dome - we had an amazing time!

After our dome visit, we couldn’t wait to get prepping for our own exhibition! 

Being authors and readers

We were so so excited to visit our newly refurbished library and choose from the huge selection of books. 

TERM 3

This term we will be reading the chapter book ‘Boy at the back of the class’. We will have a copy each to explore in depth, infer, predict, summarise and ask questions. We will learn all about refugees and discuss ways we can help change the world. 
We will also be enjoying The Barnabus Project and basing lots of our writing on this. We will be inventing our own characters, writing newspaper reports and letters. This will help us explore formal language further and practise using direct and reported speech. 

ENQUIRY 3

What do forces do? 

We will be jumping into the world of science. As scientists,  we will be exploring what forces do! This links nicely to global goal 7: looking at affordable and clean energy. We will also look at global goals 4 and 5 whilst reading Boy at the back of the class - understanding gender equality and quality education. 

Chinese New Year 2025 

This week we have been looking at Chinese culture, traditions and festivities. We really enjoyed sketching dragons and then experimenting with different media to bring our dragons to life. As a class, we worked together to create our display and totally transform our corridor in an afternoon! 

Being scientists

We loved investigating air resistance and surface area by designing and testing  parachutes  - we learnt that the larger the surface area the slower the fall due to more air resistance. We also tested drag by making two types of plane and flying them through the air. 

Mental Health Week

This week we spent lots of time talking about our emotions. We discussed how it is ok to be sad, angry etc sometimes and thought of ways we can  help these emotions. After watching a clip from inside out two, we designed our own islands and filled them with lots of our favorite things to help us when certain emotions get too much. 

Being Scientists

Oh what fun we had exploring forces in our engage. We slid, we pushed, we ran all in the name of science. Experimenting friction and air resistance has never been so enjoyable! Can you work out how we tested them? 

Enquiry two

How did the Anglo Saxons and Vikings change Britain? 

Term 2

In term two we will be continuing our study of the Vikings answering the question: How did the Anglo Saxons and Vikings change Britain. Along with deepening our research skills we will be looking at lots of evidence and artifacts and also continuing with our texts- Viking Boy and Arthur and the Golden Rope!  We love being historians! 

Christmas in a box 

Thank you Regan for talking us through the Christmas story as we created a box filled with reminders of this time of year. 

Being Authors

Wow! What a great week we have had producing our own stories based on Arthur and the Golden Rope. Oral storytelling really helped us form great sentences and know the story well. Check out our books below! We can’t wait to share them with others! 

NO PENS DAY

Good job we love to talk in 5SW! After spending the morning debating, we decided some collaboration was in need. The children were challenged to make marshmallow and spaghetti towers with limited resources. Please ask us how we did as we would love to put our oracy skills to the test! 

Being Scientists 
We have spuds! 
Our experiment worked! We discovered that the larger potato took longer to grow than the small potato but once it got going it produced 3 more potatoes. Mr Evans helped us study them and replant in the allotment. 

Being Theologins  
During our RE lessons, we have been learning all about different places of worship. We explored in detail the Sikh place of worship, a Gurdwara, and compared their similarities and differences to a church. Today (8.11.24) we visited the Gurdwara Sri Guru Singh Sabha in St George. 

We had an excellent time linking our prior learning of the topic and seeing this in person at the Gurdwara. We sat in the Langar hall where we learned all about the different foods that they serve, free of charge, at the Gurdwara. The speaker from the Gurdwara provided us with in-depth knowledge and information about the 10 Gurus (very similar to Jesus’ disciples), who were the first founders of Sikhism in India, and we looked at photographs and paintings of lots of different Gurdwara’s all over the world.

As a year group, we went upstairs into the prayer room. This was incredible to be able to see and experience what these are like as we had only learned about them in school through pictures and videos. Our guide taught us all about the 5 K’s of Sikhism – which are the markers of a Sikh identity. We asked our guide lots of questions that we had during our visit and even added more information to our RE books when we returned to school.

Interfaith day 

Today in 5SW, we discussed and learned all about world Inter-Faith week.

This is an occasion during the second week of November, that is dedicated to celebrating religious diversity and how is it prominent in our society. We discussed the different religions that are in our community and how these different religions are able to exist and operate in cohesion with each other. 

We then took a deeper dive into the Hindu religion and the religious festival of Diwali - the Hindu festival of light. As a class, we learned about why they celebrate this and why bright colours and bright lights are used. We then looked at different 'rangolis' (the art of Diwali) and discussed how we could have a go at making these ourselves with the rangoli patterns and the bright colours. 

Term 1

We have started the school year with our enquiry: What makes us all the same? Through this topic, we will become scientists and orators.  We will look at a number of life cycles, dissect plants, research metamorphosis and carry out experiments to grow our own crops. Once we are experts in the field, we will be presenting our findings to a year two class answering our question - What makes us all the same? 
 

Thank you

Thank you for visiting 5SW and letting us present our work to you. We are getting much more confident when presenting to others. 

Being Historians and Artists
We had  so much fun researching Viking shields then working in teams to design and make our own shields using a range of media. 

Being writers 

This week we have loved using Spelling Shed to help improve our spellings. We had lots of fun exploring and playing a huge selection of games. We are all so excited to start using this at home ! 

Thrive 

This week we have all been getting to know each other better, discussing our similarities and differences. We realised that 5SW are a team and thought about everything we share and how we can support each other to be the best. We decided to make a coat of arms to express our unity and differences - which we celebrated.  5SW we rock and I am so proud of all of you. 

Being Scientists

We were able to show off our investigative skills today by deciding a question to test and designing a fair test to study plant growth. We wanted to find out if a large or a small potato would grow into a plant  best and can’t wait to make observations and measurements to see if our predictions are correct. 

Being Scientists

As part of our enquiry, WHAT MAKES US ALL THE SAME we wanted to compare humans to plants.  We know both have to reproduce if life is to continue.  We enjoyed dissecting a plant to discover the female and male parts and discussing how plants reproduce.  The sticky stigma was our favorite part as we could see clearly how the pollen from the anther could easily stick there! After lots of discussions and research, we explored the allotment to compare the lily to other plants. It was lots of fun watching the bees search for nectar!