Another week has sped by in Year 5 and we’re fast approaching the end of our first term.  We celebrated the start of Advent with a lovely Assembly on Monday morning.  Father John led our Advent Assembly and Year 6 decorated our Christmas tree with Mrs O’Connor’s support. The first candle on our Advent Wreath was lit and the class teachers read the Christmas story and talked about the significance of the colours used to decorate the tree.

In Maths, this week we practised strategies to help us solve reasoning questions for addition and subtraction questions and now we are revising the formal written method for multiplication. In English we’ve developed our own sentences by using similes, metaphors and personification and have learnt about relative clauses and how they can add extra detail to a main clause.

In RE we’ve discussed the symbolism of the Advent Wreath and the importance of Advent as a time of waiting in joyful hope for Jesus.

In Geography, we have been investigating our local area and we will be comparing it to Innsbruck, a city in Austria. We have carried out a survey of what people think of the leisure facilities in our town which we will use in our comparison of the two areas.  

In Science, we investigated the effects of air resistance and discovered that the surface area of an object can affect the rate at which it falls to the ground.  The larger the surface area the slower the rate of descent of the object. In addition, we tested the effect of air resistance on ourselves by holding a large piece of card in front of us as we ran in the playground.  We could feel the air resistance pushing against the card as we ran.  We’ll continue to explore the effects of air resistance by making parachutes and testing each model to see which one takes the longest time to reach the ground depending on the size of the chute.

Many congratulations to our Writer and Stars of the Week. Have a lovely restful weekend and I’ll see you back in school on Monday.

Best wishes

Mrs Howard