Year 5 – Hippos
Welcome to the Year 5 Hippo class page! Our class teacher is called Miss Sowerby and we are supported by Mrs Ainsley.
In the Hippo class, we like to challenge ourselves and try our very best in all that we do. Every day, we learn new and exciting things and we always push ourselves to tackle new learning and concepts. We have great respect for ourselves and our learning and strive to be the best possible people we can be, by caring, listening and helping one and other!
We love reading and know it is very important that we read at home as much as possible and to bring our reading folders every day. We get spellings every Friday and practise them for our spelling test on the following Friday. Homework also gets sent out on a Friday to be completed for the Friday. We would love for parents to help with this as much as possible and our door is always open to ask for help if it is needed!
We are very lucky in our school. Not only do we learn exciting things in our core subjects of English, Maths and Science, we also have the opportunity for subject specialists to come in and teach us fabulous new skills. We have a specialist PE coach and we go swimming as part of our curriculum on a Friday afternoon. We also have music specialists who come in to teach us how to play musical instruments as part of our exciting curriculum and always create a performance at the end! We also get to learn Spanish which is fun but very challenging.
This half term we are having a Geography focus and learning all about South America and the Amazon Rainforest and linking this into our English work using the novel ‘The Explorer’ to further enhance the children’s interest and experiences whilst providing lots of creative writing opportunities and further building our reading skills. We will even be building a rainforest scene from ‘The Explorer’ within Design Technology!
In the second half of autumn term, we will be learning all about the history of the Ancient Mayans using historical sources. We will use texts such as ‘The Great Kapok Tree’, ‘The Vanishing Rainforest’ and ‘The Rain Player’ as stimulus for the children’s writing.
In school, we use an enquiry based learning approach and each term, children will begin to take ownership of their own learning and explore key concepts and ideas within a topic both independently and in small groups through the exploration of an enquiry based question – once the key knowledge and skills have been developed by the teacher. The children will then choose how to present the answer to their enquiry based question using a variety of media. Year 5’s enquiry based learning questions are as follows:
Autumn – Should deforestation of the rainforest be banned?
Spring – How did the Ancient Greeks impact today’s modern world?
Summer – How has the use of the River Tyne changed over time?
