Welcome to Year 5!

2025-26

In Year 5, our teachers are Mrs Gilchrist (Class 7), Miss Brown (Class 8), and Mrs Tamsett-Tate and Mrs Oswald (Class 9). We are also supported by our dedicated Learning Support Assistant (LSAs): Mrs Bridgeman.

If you have any questions, please get in touch with your child's teacher. If they are not around at pick-up, you can speak to them by phoning the school office and requesting an appointment.

Keep referring back to this page for regular updates about the children's learning. 

Curriculum Newsletters

Year 5 Autumn 1 - Curriculum Newsletter

Update - Thursday 25th September 2025

This week we have started our Year 5 swimming sessions at the Sports Centre. The children have thoroughly enjoyed their first sessions and it has been lovely to see them already growing in confidence in the swimming pool and listening carefully to their instructions as they are taught different strokes and shown techniques. We have a lot of great swimmers already in the year group and their hour swim each week is definitely a hit with them!

In computing, we have enjoyed our new topic 'search engines' and have been learning about alternative search engines to 'Google'. The children had the opportunity to explore a range of different search engines and reviewed them to determine which ones would be the best to use in given scenarios. After this, the children explored the accuracy and validity of information from the internet. They were given a website to explore:

 

It didn't take long for them to realise the information provided on this website was inaccurate and had been fabricated! The children uncovered evidence of inaccurate information and we discussed safety online. 

In Geography this week, the children learnt about contour lines on OS Maps. We explored a range of maps and they were given the task of making their own 3D model to represent contour lines:

Update – Friday 19th September 2025

This week, we have continued to work on our persuasive letter writing. Having completed an Apprentice piece to show off what we can do, we started to focus on the structure of paragraphs. The children were given sentences to organise and manipulate to help develop their understanding of how to make paragraphs and sentences within paragraphs cohesive. We explore how to persuade using points, explanation and evidence to further our understanding of how a paragraph is pieced together.

After that, we then spent some time applying this knowledge and practising writing paragraphs in preparation for our final pieces.

    

This week in history, we took a trip back to the year 1950 in the 20th century, when a unique dig at Yinxu uncovered the first evidence that the Shang Dynasty had existed. To help us understand more about the dig, we first listened to a news podcast about the event. Then, we re-enacted the dig with our very own archaeological dig! The children used paintbrushes to uncover the evidence within and used their historical interpretation knowledge to try to work out what the artefact told them about the Shang Dynasty. We then looked back at historical scientists' insights before choosing an artefact to write about in our books. The children were very good archaeologists and enjoyed learning about the Shang Dynasty through the artefacts discovered!

      

Our current topic 'Forces and mechanisms' is well underway now and the children investigated friction this week. We carried out an investigation into the relationship between surfaces and friction. To help us understand the concept, we used cars, ramps and different surfaces to see how the car travelled.

Update – Friday 12th September 2025

The children have now begun their exciting History unit: Dynamic Dynasties! To start the unit off, we learnt about the chronology of Ancient China and created our own interactive class timeline:

After this, we then shared a memorable experience in which we acted out a myth from the Xia Dynasty called ‘The Yellow Emperor’. The children took on the role of different characters, and as a class, we performed the play:

   

Once we had completed the play, we discussed the validity of the myth. We explored how these stories are passed down and whether we believe them to be accurate depictions of what happened or whether we believe they have been embellished or made up for creative reasons!

This week we have been exploring words containing ‘ough’ in spelling. As a class, we learnt about some of the different sounds these letters can make and explored the following words:

We used the following ‘Grow the code mat’ to explore the words and break them down into their sounds:

The children spent the week practising these words and we tested each other to see how many words containing ‘ough’ we could spell correctly.

Each week on Mondays, we will continue to give the children the spellings being focused on for that week so that if they want to, they can practice them at home too!

Update - Friday 5th September 2025

Welcome to year 5! We hope you have all had a lovely summer break and enjoyed spending time together over the holidays. We have many exciting plans in place for the children this year so stay tuned on this Year 5 group page of the website for weekly updates. 

We have already been so impressed with the way the children have come back to school and started to settle into their new classes. Although they are in the same classroom area as last year, they have stepped up their game and are adjusting well to the expectations set for year 5. Every single child has shown such a positive attitude towards their learning and to their new class teachers so we are already excited about this year ahead.

We began with full steam ahead and the children have already kicked off many of their topics for the half term. Here are a few we have already started:

In maths this half-term, we are focusing on place value. The children use a combination of White Rose maths alongside the teacher's own creative ideas and have already explored Roman numerals as well as the place value columns. This exploration will continue into next week.

We have also started our TT Rockstar practice this week and hope the children will continue to use TT Rockstars online at home to further improve their knowledge and speed of their times tables because it has such a benefit to the children throughout their maths journey.

In our English, the children have started to read their new class book 'The Boy At The Back Of The Class' and we will be completing a writing unit alongside this. On our first day, we explored the term 'refugee'. A lonely chair sat at the front of the classroom when we first came back to school and on the chair, there sat a rucksack. Inside this rucksack, we uncovered a range of clues that led to us understanding more about refugees.

We explored the art of 'persuasion' within writing and will continue to explore the skills required to write a formal letter to Miss Charman.

     Linking to our history unit 'Dynamic Dynasties', the children have explored taotie art work. They learnt about the key characteristics of taotie art and then had a go at replicating an artifact using key drawing and sketching skills. It turns out we have some fantastic artists in year 5 and cannot wait to see what they can produce throughout the year!