Year 5 - Geometry and life goals

There was overwhelming excitement on World Book Day as the children enjoyed dressing up and sharing their choice of character. Many stayed in character all day and were entirely immersed in the personalities that they wished to portray. The children also completed their Take One Picture projects and now look forward to presenting their work to their parents today and to visiting parents during Open day.

In English, we have been continuing to read Michael Morpurgo’s Kensuke’s Kingdom and were lucky enough to listen to the man himself talking to us all on World Book Day. We have been exploring how Morpurgo selects words and phrases to demonstrate character feelings and looking at how modal verbs and adverbs can help create shades of meaning in our own writing.

Pupils have discovered the fascinating Mathematics hidden in nature through the world of fractal geometry. They have explored patterns in the structure of trees, lightning and ocean waves in their own representation of ‘Stormy seas’ for Take One Picture. The children have learned that a fractal is a pattern. When you zoom in, you make the same picture. It can be cut into parts which look like a smaller version of the picture that you started with.

In Learning for Life, we have been thinking about our dreams and goals and how they compare to those of children in other parts of the world. The children have been thinking about what they would like their lives to look like in the future and then researched what they might need to do in order to achieve those goals - researching what careers might suit their personalities and what qualifications they might need for some of those careers.

In Computing, we have been learning how to create, edit, format and use spreadsheets by creating databases about countries of the world. The children also had great fun using green-screen-style technology to create weather reports during storm Eunice, producing some wonderfully entertaining outside broadcasts on the Flipgrid programme.

It was an absolute pleasure to welcome one of our parents into school to speak to Year 5 about an area that links to a previous topic we have been learning, Geographic Information System (GIS). Mr Stewart shared his knowledge on how GIS is changing the way the world works - hundreds of thousands of organisations in virtually every field are using GIS to make maps that communicate, share information, and solve complex problems around the world.

Thank you Mr Stewart for giving up your time to come into Gateway School and for sharing your knowledge and expertise with us. A great website that Mr Stewart shared with us, called LiDARFinder, lets you uncover hidden features under the ground by showing you a split-screen view of a map and its corresponding LiDAR view. Click here to take a look!