Year 5 - Bunsen burners and 3D models

The Year 5 children have enjoyed opportunities to talk about all that they can look forward to as they move into Year 6. Moving into their final year at Gateway School will bring new responsibilities, whether these are helping with the younger children, assisting with clubs or supporting the office staff. They are excited about the broader curriculum, encompassing Future Skills, Leadership and Philosophy.

We will continue to support children in their well-being as well as in their academic progress as they sit exams in the Autumn Term.

In English, in the final few weeks of term, we have drawn a close to our Victorian theme and found out what happens to Jim Jarvis in the story of Street Child. We used the lively and varied character descriptions from the novel to inform our own character descriptions, full of interesting adjectives and adverbs.

We also looked at poetry from the Victorian era, like Christmas Day in the Workhouse, to provide us with inspiration for our own narrative poems about the life and times of Jim Jarvis. It has been a superb year and the children have all made huge progress. Good job Year 5.

In Maths, the concepts of ratio and proportion have many ‘real-world’ applications. Grocery shopping, cooking and getting from place to place are three common, real-life situations in which ratios are essential to correct, cost-effective performance. Year 5 children have solved a range of word problems, including, for example, relationships between costs and amounts. They have compared prices per kilogram; calculated the amounts for ingredients in recipes and determined how long a car trip might take. Other exploration has involved exploring the use of ratios when looking at shapes and scales in maps and blueprints in designing buildings and bridges. They have come to appreciate the many applications of ratios and proportions.

Science lessons have drawn to a close the topic of materials and understanding their properties. We have been busy outside looking at different building materials used for the school. Then we created our dream house using different materials whilst explaining the advantages and disadvantages of the chosen material. Twice this term we have used the Bunsen burners. The first time was to watch how metal turned red in the heat of a blue flame and was a good conductor of heat. This week we have been trying to understand how metal can be a good conductor yet used in a cool box to stop the contents from warming up. In order to show this we used a sheet of aluminium foil which we placed between our hands and a yellow flame. We could all feel the difference that the foil made when it was a shield to the radiation heat of the flame. So now we know that metal can also reflect heat.

Year 5 have also had a mix of Art, DT, Computing and Humanities all wrapped into one this half term. The children have worked collaboratively to make a 3D model of the river cycle. They have labelled the model with relevant vocabulary and researched different parts of the river to create a ‘River Fact File’. They look amazing!