What a fantastic start to our final term in Year 5!  The highlight has to be our class trip to the RSPB’s Nature Reserve at Rye Meads yesterday. We went by train from Waltham Cross to Rye Meads and everyone was very well-behaved. The weather stayed fine for us and we were made very welcome by the RSPB staff. We spent the morning examining the wildlife that lived on land – in and around logs as well as in long grass and hedgerows.  We discovered lots of woodlice and found out that there are 37 varieties of woodlice. There's even a white one called an ant woodlouse. We saw lots of spiders, beetles, centipedes, millipedes, slugs and caterpillars as well.  We learnt that all these are invertebrates and have an exoskeleton outside their bodies. Then in the afternoon we went pond dipping to investigate the very varied wildlife in one of the large ponds on the reserve.  We discovered a very large dragonfly nymph which looked really scary close up with a magnifying glass!  There were lots of back-swimming water boatmen, blood worms, two types of water snail, leeches and even water spiders as well. It was a fascinating day and we learned a great deal about the wildlife on our doorstep. (Photographs will be posted next week).

In English we’ve started to read a new book by Nicola Davies called The Promise.  It has a very powerful environmental message and links to our Science and Geography topics really well.  In the latter we’ve been discussing and investigating renewable sources of energy which produce electricity without being too expensive and, more importantly, not causing harm to our planet. 

In Maths we’ve been using scaling to solve word problems as well as converting scale drawings into different metric units.

We finished this lovely week off with our last fund-raising event of the year. We organised a cake sale with Year 4 and raised funds for the NSPCC today.  We had a huge selection of cakes and biscuits to choose from and Year 4 really enjoyed them plus we raised a good amount for the charity too.  Many thanks to everyone who contributed.

Many congratulations to our Writer and Stars of the Week. Have a good week-end and enjoy the sunshine. Take care and stay safe.

Best wishes

Mrs Howard and Mrs Direnzo