Year 5

Snow mania!

The children had great fun this week playing out in the snow at break and lunchtimes.

We have been continuing our English work on ‘Titanium’ this week and, to get in to character, we used hot seating. The children put themselves in to the shoes of ‘the boy’ with the help of their ‘brains’ and had to answer questions about his powers and how they think he got them. What’s your theory?

In RE we have learned all about our Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle. We learned about our Bishop (Seamus Cunningham), what he wears and how he carries out his mission. We also learned about our cathedral. Can you tell your parents the name of our cathedral and where it is located?

Today we have started our new computing topic. We are learning to use coding through ‘Scratch’; free programming language where you can create your own interactive stories, games, and animations. This afternoon we familiarised ourselves with Scratch and then started to make our very own game. Some of us were even able to begin to play them! If you would like to practice at home, the website is:

https://scratch.mit.edu/

Have a great weekend everybody and don’t forget to keep rocking with our new Time Table Rockstars! Who will be top of the leader board next week?

– Mrs Kelly

 

 

 

Welcome Back!

I hope you have all had a merry Christmas and a happy and holy new year!

The children have had a fantastic first week back in school. Our new topic is all about the Tudor’s so, on Monday, we made a timeline which outlined the key events of the Tudor period and then used tissue paper to make our own Tudor roses. Can you tell your families what the rose represents?

On Wednesday we started our new RE topic; Mission. The children chose a quote we liked from the bible and that represented Jesus’ mission. We used paint and straws to get creative, blow through and create a dripping effect.

Year 5 ventured to Castle Keep on Thursday for our topic trip. Firstly, we visited Bessie Surtees’ house on Newcastle’s Quay Side. It was great to see the features which showed it was from the Tudor times and, once inside, we explored different artefacts which would have been used during this time period. After lunch, we learned all about different torture techniques which were used on Tudor criminals. They were harsh and gruesome but the children loved it…maybe a little too much!

Finally, in English we are exploring stories from different view points. The children are enjoying watching a music video and analysing the story line and language in the song to get to the bottom of what is really going on. We have been using figurative language and “show not tell” to improve our writing skills.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the week as much as I have.

Have a great weekend everyone!

-Mrs Kelly

Follow The Star!

This has been a fulfilled week preparing for our Christmas concert! Thank you so much to all of the children and  parents for coming along on Thursday night. It was a great night for everyone involved.

Also this week, year 5 were lucky enough to watch the Key Stage 1 nativity performance. Thanks so much to all of the staff and children involved in ‘Born in a Barn’; we had a great time watching it! On Friday, we were able to watch the Christmas music concert by the children who learn to play instruments in school. Well done to our very own Anna, Bea, Nick, Pedro, Annabel, Ed, Ben and Emily – you played brilliantly!

In English this week, we have been writing instructions on how to make origami Santa and Christmas trees. We had to follow visual instructions (which proved fairly difficult) and so we decided to write some clearer instructions for anyone else that wants to make the Christmas Craft.

In RE, we have discussed the symbolism in William Holman Hunt’s, ‘The Light of the World’. Can you tell your parents what this picture is all about and how we can link it to other scriptures and Catholic traditions?

Well done to Emily M, Pedro and Izzy for their fantastic interpretations of ‘Alchemy Island’!

Finally, thank you to all of the parents and children for your kind donations to ‘Save the Children’ for Christmas Jumper Day. We had a fantastic time showing off our amazing Christmas outfits and thoroughly enjoyed our Christmas Dinner!

See you next week for our final school week of 2018!

-Mrs Kelly

Another great week from year 5.

In English this week, we have been working on diary entries using adverbials of time, prepositional phrases and expanded noun phrases. We used a video called ‘The Alchemist’s Letter’ as our stimulus for this work.

Although we only spent one week on this topic, the quality of the diaries the children produced were fantastic! On Friday, we had our final grammar lesson on pronouns – there are SO many different types! The children worked in groups to teach the rest of the class about their allocated pronoun and set them a challenge. The children learned so much from our mini teachers!

In RE, we are continuing to learn about Advent and the way in which Christians prepare for the coming of Jesus at Christmas. On Wednesday, we learned about Jesse trees and how they symbolise different stories from the old testament. Can you remember why the stories are shown through symbols rather than words back in Jesus’ time? We then made our own…

This week in Maths, we have been learning how to measure angles using protractors. Some of us were even able to accurately draw our own angles. On Friday, we measured the angles we could see in stick men.

On Thursday afternoon, we travelled to St. Mary’s Cathedral in Newcastle. We sang carols in ‘The Big Sing’ along with many other Catholic schools in the Newcastle area. The children were brilliant and should be so proud of their singing! I would like to give a special thanks to Annie and Ed who read beautifully in the cathedral in front of so many people.

In Science, we looked at electrical circuits as part of our Properties and Changes of Materials topic. We were testing which materials are the best electrical conductors. Tell your parents the difference between an electrical conductor and a thermal conductor!

Finally, Mrs Ambrose delivered a surprise to the year 5 classroom on Friday morning; letters from our pen-pals in Germany! Last half term, the children wrote letters to students from an international school in Munich to tell them all about what life was like in Newcastle. The children have replied telling us what it’s like to live in Germany, their hobbies and their likes and dislikes. We were so excited to read our letters and one of the children even sent us a calendar for our classroom and chocolates for the whole class! We will write back to our friends in Germany before Christmas and get our letters sent off so that they receive them in the new year.

Have a great weekend!

– Mrs Kelly

MADD Week!

This week was MADD week in St. Charles’ and what a week we have had! We started off the week by having an assembly in which Mrs Nealings introduced us to ‘The Fighting Temeraire’; an 1838 oil painting by James M. W. Turner.

All of our hard work this week was based around this image and our interpretation of  this celebrated gunship on her last voyage. We started off the week by building up to our very own watercolour, decoupage interpretations of how the Temeraire should have really looked. Can you tell your parents why this image isn’t factually correct?

Mood Boards

Sketching, Shading and Hatching

Blending

Decoupage

 

In the second half of the week, our focus was digital literacy. We had a great time working in groups with year 6 so that we could share our expertise! Our aim was to make a movie trailer for a new movie entitled ‘The Fighting Temeraire’. The children had great fun using the green screen to dramatise their story lines and then edit their stills and motion using the green screen app. We used iMovie to amalgamate all of our shots into our final edits. The trailers were fantastic and we were so pleased with how they turned out! We then used a third app to put all of our work from the week together into book creator. The books look great and they really help tell the story of MADD week!

Thank you to Colombe, Emily B and Dexter who have seized the opportunity to create more fantastic models for their optional homework. They look great!

Finally, we ended our week by preparing for advent by…putting up the Christmas tree! We will decorate the tree on Monday.

Roll on December.

See you next week! 😊

– Mrs Kelly

 

Welcome back!

Mrs Kelly’s favourite moment of this week was reading all of year 5’s amazing legends! On Monday, we dramatised our stories in preparation for our writing on Wednesday and Thursday. The videos were great and the children had a fantastic time taking on the roles of Death, the narrator and the three friends. What was your favourite part to act out?

During our topic lesson, we researched the meaning of alchemy. Some of the children had already studied this over half term so they were our experts! We used the ipads to research gold and found out so many cool facts (such as the chemical symbol for gold is ‘Au’). Can anyone remember why? We then used our new knowledge to write non-chronological reports about gold.

Thank you to Nick and Henry W who completed amazing optional homework tasks. They have created 3-D interpretations of Alchemy island and they look fantastic!

On Thursday, we continued with learning our new language; Mandarin! Can you remember any key words or phrases?

At the end of the week, because Mrs Kelly thought we had done so well with our Maths, we used the iPads to test our knowledge of multiplication and division using an app called ‘Kahoot!’. The children worked in pairs to answer quiz questions quickly to gain the most points. Well done to Jack and Izzy, Dexter and Isobel, and Evie B and Anna, who were our six winners!

Finally, on Friday afternoon, Mrs Nealings surprised us with an envelope. Inside it was a message…

What could it be? Our guesses are:

• A part of the mysterious poster that was displayed around key stage 2 on Friday.
• Part of a treasure island map.
• The surface of a planet.
• An image from our previous literacy topic – ‘The Eye of the Storm’.
• The glistening sea at sunset from a painting.
• A desert.
• The deck of a pirate ship.
• Reflections of a ship on the sea.

See you Monday to find out what on earth is going on!

-Mrs Kelly