In Year 5, children have been learning about South and West African music. They have sung a traditional African song called ‘Shosholoza’ and played chords using glocks to accompany the song. They then added traditional African movements to their song and class 5LR then performed this as an ensemble in front of the whole school. We all enjoyed watching this fantastic performance!
Science Council have had great fun this half term making pop and Mentos geysers, spooky cauldron mixtures, Halloween lights from milk bottles and experimenting with pencils being pierced through zip lock bags of water. It has been a fun half term that’s for sure.
We celebrated Roald Dahl Day on Wednesday 13th September. Staff and children were encouraged to wear yellow (because this was Roald Dahl’s favourite colour) and pay £1 for the Dahlicious charity. As well as finding out about Roald Dahl and his charity some of our lessons were linked to a Roald Dahl book.
One of the lessons was a competition. We read extracts from the BFG and then linked with this the children drew something in a jar, like the ones the BFG had, that they would like to see in a dream. We had great fun!
We enjoyed making oversized jewellery in Year 5.
Year 5 are currently studying South America, with a focus on the Amazon. Abel Rodríguez is an elder from the Nonuya ethnic group, native to the Cahuinarí river in the Colombian Amazon. Rodríguez’s work is grounded in his ancestral knowledge of the indigenous plants of the region, which was passed to him by his uncle. He has an exhibition at the Baltic on Gateshead quayside where you can go and see his work. We used his art as inspiration to create these pop up rainforests. We tried hard to create texture in our rainforests using magazines and hatching using oil pastels on different types of paper before cutting out leaf and tree shapes.
On Friday 4th March, Year 5 went to Beamish. Our focus was on sketching what we saw, but the weather made that difficult! We went to see Norman Cornish’s house (an artist we have been studying in school) and enjoyed looking at the house that he lived in and did a lot of his art in. All of the children had a wonderful day (despite the weather) and asked the experts some fantastic, relevant questions which meant that they really got the most out of their day. We did a typical Victorian pose on some of the photos – we didn’t smile. That was because you had to stand still in your ‘pose’ for a whole minute without moving before the photo was taken, so a straight face was easier to keep than a smiling one. Can you spot the photos where we are doing this?
Over the last couple of weeks children have been undertaking work in their RE lessons, focusing on the beliefs and practices of Christianity associated with Christmas. On Thursday 19th December 2019, children from each year group, shared their work with the rest of the school and gave an explanation as to what they had been learning about and why.
The following questions were answered in each year group:
Year 3: ‘How and why is Advent important over Christmas?’
Year 4 ‘Why do Christians call Jesus the light of the World?’
Year 5 ‘What are the themes of Christmas?’
Year 6 ‘What do the gospel stories tell us about the birth of Jesus?’
On Wednesday 19th September, Years 5 and 6 were visited by the Newcastle Eagles basketball team. They came as part of the ‘Hoops4Health’ roadshow and we had 4 different sessions which taught us about keeping healthy.
We did some basketball drills which showed us how important physical exercise is; we learned about our heart and how to keep it healthy by keeping active; we looked at peer pressure, the reasons for it (both positive and negative) and how we can deal with these situations in our own lives and we also looked at nutrition and how to make sure we are feeding our bodies the right things.
We had a fantastic time and learned a lot.
Year 5 were visited by Bjarni the Viking last week and he taught us all about Viking life with a focus on sailing, weapons and laws; we even held a trial! We wrote kenning poems; explored and enquired about Viking artefacts and some of us got to strike our very own Viking penny. We had a great day and cannot wait to find out more about this fascinating History topic!
