This week in Ock Class- w/c 26th April

Dear parents and carers,

What an brilliant week we've had in year 5! I have been so impressed with the children this week. they've all worked really hard and the standard of their work is improving really quickly.

In English the children have spent this week writing, editing and revising their short nature narratives. I've read them all today and they're super- they all have lovely details in about their settings as well as their character's senses. It was quite a short and simple piece in some ways, so this gave them room to work on their vocabulary choices. We also worked hard on avoiding the trap of starting lots of sentences with "I" when using the 1st person by using different fronted adverbials as sentence openers. The stories work really well so I'm really pleased with the outcome. Next week we're moving on a bit to delve in "The Lost Words" and to start exploring some poetry.

In maths this week we've continued to focus on fractions, and we've been working hard on finding equivalent fractions, changing improper fractions into mixed numbers (and vice versa) as well as comparing and ordering them. The children found this a bit tricky at first, but they were all real steadfast squirrels and they completed nailed it in today's lesson! Their confidence is continuing to build, so I'm really pleased to be able to continue with fractions next week. We'll mainly be looking at adding fractions next week, including within 1 and adding 3 or more fractions.

In our history lesson today we used a special educational version of a video game set in ancient Athens to explore the buildings and temples on the Acropolis. It worked brilliantly on the HUGE touchscreen that we are currently testing in the classroom (although my steering of the character was a bit wobbly!).  Some of the children were interested in downloading it themselves at home (it will work much better on a gaming PC than my old laptop!). You can find out more information about the game here: https://www.ubisoft.com/en-gb/game/assassins-creed/discovery-tour
IMPORTANT: you need the Discovery Tour NOT the main game (which is PEGI 18 so not suitable for children!). The Discovery Tour is PEGI 7+ so suitable for KS2.  It's currently £17 but I got it on sale for £7, so it's worth keeping an eye on the website to see if another sale arises.

Mrs B

Three things to ask your child this week:

1. What was the best thing about the huge touchscreen that we had in the classroom this week?
2. What did you learn about ancient Athens in your history lesson?
3. What different clubs did you use in your tri-golf lesson?