Year 5 - Exploring Ancient Egypt

Our Year 5 children have made a wonderful start to the school year and are enjoying the increased independence that it brings. With more opportunity to make considered decisions has come the responsibility of organising their own belongings and equipment. Talking to many of them, they are enjoying the chance to move around school and to experience specialist teaching across the curriculum. They are often seen busily checking their timetables to get to the correct classroom.

The children are enjoying using their Chromebooks across a variety of lessons and for different purposes. They are becoming adept at choosing the best platform for the information they wish to represent.

The children enjoyed National Fitness Day. Not only were they energised for the day ahead, they also encouraged and challenged the younger children, guiding them around the circuit of tasks. The benefits of the day’s events stretched far beyond the sports field!

Children love big numbers! They love counting as high as they can. Eventually they appreciate that place value helps us understand the magnitude of numbers and the structure of our number system. Invariably they finish with infinity! The endless nature of numbers is a fascinating concept, particularly when compared with numbers relating to Space and beyond. Children have also thought about negative numbers furthered their understanding by solving problems in the context of the real world

The children have dived straight into our class text for this term - ‘The Nowhere Emporium’ - which has thoroughly intrigued and gripped us all! So far, we have considered what possible clues the front cover has revealed about the upcoming story and explored the author’s mysterious prologue. We can’t wait to read more and be inspired for our own prologue writing over the coming weeks.

The children have returned to Gateway with a real enthusiasm for this term’s topic of Ancient Egypt and began the year with a number of facts and questions they wished to delve into throughout the term.

After discussing where and when to place events on a timeline, we focused on key events in the Ancient Egyptian times, discussing whether we thought they had a positive or negative impact on the people of Ancient Egypt, considering why this might be.

We have also started to explore the importance of the River Nile to everyday life and the children were interested to learn it was not only used for food, but for buildings, leisure and hygiene. The children’s questions and enquiry continue to lead the lesson content and we look forward to discovering more with them throughout the term.