Welcome to Illingworth Class – Year 5/6!

Our class teacher is Mrs Wolstencroft

Autumn 1:

 

Week 5:

A new week, and lots of hands-on learning! We began the week by pretending to be gold miners in America, sieving through materials to separate gold, though in our case we were looking for pink glitter! Following our sieving, we tried our hand at scientific drawing. It’s quite tricky to draw a sieve, but we gave it our best shot!

During our English lessons, we have started a new piece of writing: a diary entry. On Monday, we discovered a diary entry from a boy called Daniel in our classroom. He talked about his encounter with a girl (Rose Blanche) and her kindness and compassion towards him.

As part of our SPaG lessons, we did some sentence surgery to learn about coordinating and subordinating conjunctions. We cut up our sentences and explored the effect of moving the subordinating clauses within a sentence to help us create atmosphere in our writing.

Week 4: Another busy week in Illingworth class! This week, we have been publishing our alternative narratives inspired by the book ‘Rose Blanche’. We have been working particularly hard on our handwriting and presentation, and it has really been paying off.

In maths, we have now finished our unit on place value, and we are experts in numbers to 1,000,000! We are moving on to addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. To start, we have been thinking about factors and multiples.

In History this week, we have been looking at the causes of World War 2. We each made a timeline in our books to show the different events and considered which event was the biggest contributing factor to the outbreak of war. This prompted some very interesting discussions, and we certainly had a lot of questions!

Week 3: This week, we took our Year 6 children to Oxford to take part in Junior Citizens, a workshop which encourages children

to develop the life skills and awareness to keep themselves safe as they gain more independence and responsibility. The children took part in a range of different scenarios and thought about how they would respond and keep themselves safe. Particularly important to our children in Standlake was the scenario surrounding staying safe around large bodies of water.

Week 2: We have had a wonderful week getting stuck in to all our learning this week.

During Topic this week, we looked at some artefacts from WWII. We thought about what each artefact was, how it was used and who might have used it. This prompted some really interesting discussions and questions.

Science this week had the potential to be quite messy! We are learning about materials this term, and this week we looked at what a mixture is. In groups, the children were set the challenge of creating mixtures using a range of substances and meeting a variety of criteria. The paint and glitter were firm favourites with the class, though perhaps not with Mrs Wolstencroft! We learned that a mixture is a physical combination of two or more substances that are not chemically joined together.

Music this week has been a real hit! We are looking at looping music this term and enjoyed listening to a remix of The Lion King. We identified the features that had been changed in the remix and thought about how we might apply these to our own compositions.

The children then worked in pairs to create their own loops on Chrome Music Lab. They experimented with different pitches, rhythms, instruments and tempos to create different effects. At the end of the lesson, we listened to everyone’s compositions and had a great time thinking about what the music reminded us of.

 

Week 1: Wow! What a start to the year we have had! It has been wonderful to welcome the Year 5s into Illingworth Class this year, and we have hit the ground running. We have jumped straight into our learning and have already seen some wonderful progress in understanding, particularly in our place value unit in maths. We have been learning about numbers up to a million and how we can represent these in different ways.

In English this week, we started by looking at our No Outsiders book, The Island. This book illustrates racism and prejudice in an island community when a stranger visits. I have been very impressed by the thoughtful diary entries the children have produced, taking on the perspective of a child who questions the behaviours they witness towards the stranger.

We have also started studying our book for the term, Rose Blanche — a tale of a girl in Nazi Germany and her kindness towards those around her. To start the unit, we have focused on understanding and unpicking the story and its message before we dive into our writing next week.

Illingworth Class have particularly enjoyed music this week, where we listened to dance music and began to think about looping rhythms and pitches. Whilst it was challenging to stay in time with the rest of the class, it is a skill for us to work on and develop in the coming weeks.

 

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