Tadpole update

Our tadpoles have been busy eating and growing over the last few weeks in our classroom. They are now starting to develop back legs, we really hope they turn into frogs before the summer!!

World Down Syndrome Day

We are celebrating World Down Syndrome Day today by wearing our odd socks in the classroom!

Geography in Cirencester

We went for a walk around our local area, looking at the different geographical features along the way. We are building up a fact file on Cirencester and will use the map we have drawn, along with different sketches in our work.

Tadpoles!

They are happy swimming around in their tank and eating pond weed and fish food!

Red Nose Day 2019

Emma and Helen in our class had organised a red nose hunt for the school to enjoy today. 

World Book Day 2019

We celebrated  World Book day this year with a book speed dating  session. We all chose our favourite book and brought into class (adults too!).  We then found a partner and each shared our book for 2 minutes, trying to persuade the other person to read it. At the end, we voted for the book that we wanted to try reading next, we have come up with a top 10 list of books to try in Brazil Class.

Frog Spawn

We are going to be watching the development of the frog spawn in the classroom, keep checking back to see the changes!

Space Buggies

We have started to think about designing space buggies. We have researched different ones and looked carefully at the moon buggy and the mars rover, identifying the different features and thinking why they look like they do. We have identified different areas we wanted to test ready to design our own buggies to explore planets in space. We thought about whether the wheel would go on a sandy surface, how to move sand out of the way when driving, how to float (if on a planet with liquid) and how to survive on a bumpy surface, amongst others. We are going to  use our findings to help us design our own space vehicles.

Number Day!

Ireland class came and joined us for a fun number themed lesson. We worked in pairs with a year 1, who was in charge, to create a poster detailing all the facts they could think of about their favourite number. We really enjoyed helping and encouraging them with their facts and designs.

Moon Phases

We have been thinking about how and why the moon appears to change shape over time. We have been thinking about the moon reflecting the light from the sun to 'shine' and how sometimes the moon is in shadow which is why we cannot see it all. We created stop motion animation videos to show the main 8 phases of the moon, check out our videos below!

Where is it?!

We have been looking at different maps lately including atlases and OS maps. We have also looked closely at the different symbols on OS maps, deciding if we could improve upon them and make them better and understanding what they are showing. We thought about what people would do in an area based on what we could find on the map. For example, if there were lots of footpaths and open green spaces, we decided people would be out walking.

Our Solar System

Our topic for this term is looking at space and our solar system. We have been drawing scaled pictures of the planets, using the scale 1000km = 1mm. We have also used the same  scale to work out how big the sun is and how far apart all the planets are. We used trundle wheels to measure the distance between the sun and Mercury, and realised that if we used the same scale, we cannot fit the next  one  onto our school field!

Visit to the Mosque

Year 5 were very lucky to be able to visit a mosque in Gloucester. We were welcomed by Imam Hussan, who gave us loads of information about his religion, Islam, and gave us a guided tour of his mosque. We all found out lots of information that we did not already know, which will  help us in our Religious Education topic this term.

Christmas Treasure Hunt

On the last day of term before we enjoyed our Christmas holidays, a group of girls from Brazil class organised a fundraising event for Centrepoint (a homeless charity).  We had to find the treasure chests hidden around the school grounds and solve a riddle.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

We have a random acts of kindness advent calendar this year, each day a member of the class will be picked and will have a kindness challenge to complete. We have ones including helping with the cooking and cleaning at home and helping people with their learning in school. Christmas is a time of giving, so we are giving our time!

Million word party!

We had our million word party to celebrate having read a million words as a class since September. We chose to have some extended, quiet reading time with our friends, dressed in PJs with a hot chocolate.  Thank you to parents for encouraging your child to read at home, please continue to read lots of books, especially those coloured ones on the system - let's see when we can get our next million words!

Children in Need

We had great fun celebrating Children in Need with a duck hunt organised by some incredible members of our class.

Plant update

Even more changes with our leaves. We think we now know which ones were sexual and asexual and have edited our hypothesis!

Plant update

Some quite big changes are happening with our leaves now.

Wilson museum trip

We had a lovely day at The Wilson museum, in Cheltenham, finding out lots more about the Anglo Saxon time.

Plant update

Some of the leaves are starting to die, what do you think this shows?

Plant reproduction experiment

We have been looking at asexual and sexual reproduction  in plants. We know that plants that reproduce asexually only need one parent plant, whereas plants that reproduce sexually need two parent plants and need to mix together pollen and ovules. We are investigating the question 'Can you tell if a plant is a sexual or asexual reproducer based  on their leaves?'. We studied a selection of different leaves (beech, bramble, Christmas cacti, dandelion and jade tree) and decided that in order to reproduce asexually, the leaves need to be able to store enough energy to grow a new plant. Some of us think that the bigger the leaf, the more energy they store and some of us think that the fatter the leaf, the more energy they store. We have all chosen two different leaves, planted  them and are going to care for them to see if our predictions are correct. We think  that if a plant is a sexual reproducer, the leaf will die as it does not have enough energy stored inside to grow a new  plant because it is used to making seeds. We think  that if a plant is an asexual reproducer, the leaf will live and a new  plant will begin to grow as it has enough energy stored in the leaf to do so. Check back to see what we have found!

Seed Production

We were looking at the processes of pollination and fertilisation to create seeds. We went outside to role play the different parts of this process, describing what we were doing at the different stages.