We hope that you had a lovely Easter break. Welcome to the summer term where we look forward to a calendar full of exciting events and learning.

In Year 5, we will continue to study The Adventures of Odysseus for the next couple of weeks or so, and then we will move on to study native tales from North America, some narrative poetry, and finally we will dip into one of Shakespeare’s best loved tragedies: Romeo and Juliet. In guided reading we will read a variety of fiction and non-fiction texts with a focus on comprehension techniques and responding to questioning.

Maths

Our curriculum is based on the White Rose Maths programme. This research-based initiative ensures that the skills and concepts children are taught are fully embedded before moving on. The children are taught strategies such as bar modelling and have plenty of opportunities to use ‘manipulatives’ such as counters and dienes all the way through the school.

This term we will be focusing on properties of shape, co-ordinates, position and direction, converting units, measuring volume and further work on decimals.

Children should also use the Times Tables Rockstars program to increase their quick recall of multiplication and related division facts. Century is also available for use at home to reinforce understanding of concepts delivered in school.

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Curriculum Highlights

This term, we continue to learn about Ancient Greece before moving on to study aspects of North America.  In Science, we will focus on life cycles and growing up and growing old.  We will also have a couple of lessons based on puberty which will form part of our relationships and sex education programme (within PHSE). A separate letter and PowerPoint will be sent to you shortly to provide more details and the content to be covered.

You can find out more information about the summer term learning by looking at the overviews and programmes of study on the website.

Home Learning

Reading books and reading journals should be brought to school every day. The reading records have space for keeping a record of books read, and every third or so page has a creative space where your child can make a response to the book they are currently reading.  The teacher will have informed the children which day their record should be handed in.  We wholeheartedly encourage you to still hear your child read at this stage and also for you to read to them. We would really value a parental comment in the book each week as this shows the children that we have a partnership with you and take reading very seriously. 

Home learning for this term will be either based on either maths or English and the children will be set one piece each week from Thursday 25^th April to Thursday 23^rd May, and again from 8^th June to 6^th July inclusively. Please encourage and support your child to use TTRS, Century and Spellzone to assist their learning. If your child does not yet know their tables to 12 x 12 for instant recall, then we suggest that they access TTRS on a daily basis. Also, if your child finds spelling tricky, then daily work Century should help their progress. We will be encouraging the children to use these programs with class and year group competitions.

The home learning grid is filled with creative ideas and we expect all children to complete one English, one maths and one creative task every half term. Please speak to your child’s teacher if your child finds a particular subject in the grid more challenging and requires extra support (in addition to that given in class) to complete it.

We encourage all children to use Century, an online learning portal, at home as much as possible. Century uses the White Rose Maths scheme of learning for maths and also offers children an opportunity to progress their English and foundation subject knowledge.