St MARTIN's Class (Year 5) -2023/2024

Welcome to Year 5!

We hope you enjoy looking at our class page. This is where you will find all of the useful details about the year including curriculum information, important dates, and a diary of our learning. 

Meet the team

Miss C. Molloy (Mon-Wed)

Mrs L. Romero (Thurs-Fri)

Mrs A. Cabrera (PPA cover Wed and Fri afternoon)

Mr M. Williams (PPA cover - PE - Wed afternoon)

This term, Term 5, we also have 2 lovely student teachers: Miss Fitzgerald and Miss Evans. We are also lucky this term to have our highly skilled Teaching assistants working alongside lots of our pupils: Mrs Deliot and Mrs Sweeney.

PE Days

Wednesday and Thursday. Please wear your PE kit to school. Children need to remove all earrings, watches and other jewellery for PE lessons, so if they are unable to do this independently, please remove them at home that morning.

Equipment

Children will be provided with all learning equipment and stationery in school so please leave all pencil cases, etc at home, especially if it's valuable or special to your child. Children are encouraged to bring a water bottle to school with water; please label it clearly.

Click here for more information about the way classroom life is organised in Year 5.

Reading/Homework

Homework is set on a Wednesday and marked on a Wednesday. It may be handed in early or late, and will be marked on Wednesday. We welcome early arrivals! Your child may have 2 green homework books; we don't mind which is used. Reading logbooks will be checked every Wednesday and your child may get a star on our class reading chart for reading 5 times a week. Parents - please continue to listen to your child's reading, at least 1/2 times a week.

Homework Due May 1st

Termly Enquiry 

Term 1

Enquiry question: How does the legacy of Ancient Greece impact my world today?

Term 2 

Enquiry question: How can we show what we believe in? A study of the Ancient Maya civilisation.

Term 3

Enquiry question: How can Science help the vulnerable?

Term 4 : 

Enquiry question: Who trades with whom?

Term 5

Click here for an overview of all our different learning this term.

Enquiry Question 1: How are we saving the planet?

Term 6

Our Class Blog 2023-2024

This term, we are exploring the text "A hero like me" and learning to write balanced arguments. We are thinking about the events of the Colston Statue protests in June 2020 in Bristol, and asking the question: Was it right to pull down Colston's statue?

To develop our understanding, we went on a class trip to Bristol City Centre to follow the protestors' route that day, June 7th 2020. At each point along the route, we discussed the feelings, thoughts and arguments of the protestors, the police and the onlookers. We thought about what we would do, and what we agreed and disagreed with, and why. Ultimately, we realised how complicated this question was, and how important it was to consider all the sides in order to make a balanced decision. We are excited to start planning our balanced arguments in our English lessons!

March 2024: Let's use Active Travel to commute to school and work.

This week, Andrew from South Glos Council did an online Active Travel Workshop with us. We learned how much we could do, for ourselves, our community and for the planet, by commuting to school using active travel rather than the car.

We wrote poems promoting Active Travel to school, which Miss Molloy entered into the Active Travel Competition, where we might win a new scooter and helmet. Exciting!

February 2024: Our afternoon of Trading!

As part of our Enquiry into 'Who traded with whom?', Year 5 had an afternoon of trading, which we really enjoyed. We discussed how lots of things can be traded: pokemon cards, football cards, stationery, class donuts…We realised that both sides had to agree to the trade, that an item might become more of less valuable depending on how much someone wanted it (‘demand’), and that it was possible to ‘trade up’.

We are taking on a fun trading challenge this term: to start with one paperclip and see how successfully we can ‘trade up’. Can we match Kyle MacDonald’s house?

The wonderful St Martin's Class have worked so well as a team in so may ways (keeping the classroom tidy, working independently on learning tasks, helping the teacher, helping each other...) that they have earned 20 class donuts. As their class reward, they voted for a 'Break the Rules' Christmas Party. We played some hilarious games, where they got to eat lots of chocolate....

OUR WOW SCIENCE DAY! 8^th November, 2023.

Jo Richardson from Space Detectives came in to spend the whole day with us. We larned all about the Solar System, the planets, gravity and even did some Virtual Reality. Amazing Science!

October 2023

Why do we have day and night? How can people say the Sun stays still when it moves across the sky over the course of a day?

Year 5 discussed these Big Questions and decided we needed, as Scientists, to collect some evidence. We knew that the Sun stayed still, and that the Earth rotated and orbited the Sun. Otus came up with the suggestion of investigating how our shadows changed over a day, as that would show that the direction of sunlight changed according to how much the Earth was moving (rotating) away from the Sun. 

At 10am, we picked a spot in the playground, drew around our shadows and measured their length. Every hour until 3pm we repeated the same measurement. Obafemi and Freya had the good idea of also measuring how far apart the shadows were from each other, as that showed the distance the Earth had rotated in one hour.

Sometimes it was cloudy, so it was impossible to take any readings. (However our Sun Dances were very successful too!)

Our results showed that our shadows changed position and length over the course of a day. They were the shortest around midday, which Zak explained was correct as that was when the Sun was directly above us and so cast the shortest shadow.

We really enjoyed being Scientists for the whole day today - look at our photos below!

We took turns to be the Earth, Sun and Moon. We had to rotate and orbit in the correct positions to simulate the movement of the Moon around the Earth and the Earth around the Sun. It got very dizzy – but it really helped us to understand the position of the Moon in relation to the Earth!