Welcome to Year 5! 

The Year 5 team are delighted to welcome you all to this new academic year and feel very privileged to be teaching and supporting this lovely class once again!

The arrangements for staffing will revert to Mrs Bales as your child’s full-time class teacher for the duration of the year, supported by Mrs McComish (our very experienced class Teaching Assistant) and Mrs Black (our class Learning Support Assistant). Mr Boardman will once again be teaching P.E once a week.

We have set out below some helpful information about what you and your child can expect over the course of this school year. If you require any further information, as always, please come and chat to Mrs Bales or Mrs McComish after school or send an email via the school office

 secretary@st-michaels-school.org .

Class Teacher: Mrs Bales 

Support Staff: Mrs McComish and Mrs Black

Class Routines:

• Please ensure that your child arrives at school between 8.40am – 8.50am.
• Children are given morning tasks to complete before register, and it is important that all children feel settled each morning, in order to start the day as positively as possible.
• Assemblies take place daily at 9.00am each morning.  

PE:

• PE will take place on a Tuesday (Outdoor PE with Mr Boardman) and on a Friday (Indoor PE with Mrs Bales).
• No earrings or watches are allowed.
• Children should come into school wearing only the correct school PE kit on PE days.
• Year 5 swimming will commence after half-term (week commencing 31^st October 2022). Details will be sent out to parents in due course.

Home Learning:

• Children will be issued alternating English and Maths homework on a Monday, which will then be marked the following Monday. 
• It is extremely important that homework is completed and brought into school by the deadline.
• We are encouraging independence now we have reached Year 5 and therefore each child should be completing their reading record, with a signature from a parent/carer to confirm reading has taken place. 
• Children are encouraged to be responsible for ensuring their home-work is completed on time and for taking care of their home-learning book throughout the year. 
• We no longer send spellings home to learn in rote fashion and children are no longer tested weekly. All spellings work takes place in school in the form of fortnightly spellings investigations, focussing on 15 key words.

Class Rewards:

• Each academic year starts with the class discussing their goals, responsibilities and the learning environment they want to create. These form the basis of our ‘Wonderful We Wills’ which are displayed as a charter, signed by each child.
• Children will be awarded house points for outstanding work and those who have put in exceptional effort are celebrated in assembly each Friday by receiving a Headteacher’s award.
• Each term, each class will nominate one student to receive the coveted ‘Pride of St Michael’s’ award which celebrates children who have consistently demonstrated our school values of ‘Courage’, ‘Compassion’, ‘Creativity’ and ‘Community’.

Outdoor Learning:

• Woods walks and outdoor learning will continue into Year 5. Our visits will be linked to curriculum subjects with teacher-led learning and children are also encouraged to explore the rich woodland environment at Ambarrow Woods.
• Details of Woods Walks will be released the week before they are planned. Children will be required to come to school in weather appropriate shoes and clothes, with their usual school uniform to change back into. 

Year 5 Topics:

Year 5 will start this academic year with a WOW trip which will form the basis of an important creative project led by the children. Details of the September trip and the project will follow shortly.

• During the Autumn term, our Year 5 history focus will be on Early Islamic Civilization. In geography, we will be studying volcanoes and earthquakes, why these happen and how people manage to live in volatile areas of Earth.
• Spring term will be spent learning about the post-Roman invaders of the United Kingdom including the Anglo-Saxons and Vikings. We will be studying their impact on life in Britain, which includes a residential trip to Hooke Court. Our geography focus will be rivers and water cycles.
• We will finish the year exploring the countries within South America, where we will research this continent to understand climate, cultures, languages and its human and physical geography.
• Art, Design & Technology and Cooking lessons will be connected to each topic studied.  

English:

• Last year demonstrated that our children are creative and confident writers, and their writing will be developed further this year to extend and refine their grammatical and composition skills.
• This year, the core books we will be studying and linking to our writing are: War Horse, Hidden Figures, The Saga of Erik the Viking, The Highwayman, True Survivors and Journey to the River Sea. These texts will form a rich basis on which to develop writing skills in several genres: Character Studies, Diary Entries, Online Newspaper articles, Narrative & Image Poetry, Biographies, Information Reports and Leaflets and Fantasy Fiction.  

Maths:

• We begin the Autumn term by deepening the children’s knowledge and application of the four operations (addition, subtraction, division and multiplication). We will also build on our knowledge of place value and ordering numbers as well as revisiting fractions.
• During spring term, we will be exploring decimals and percentages and how to use and interpret statistics.
• Summer term will be spent studying geometry of shapes and converting units of measure and volume.

Science:

• Our exciting science curriculum will start with an Autumn focus on ‘Forces’ followed by ‘Earth and Space’.
• During the Spring term we will deepen the children’s prior knowledge of ‘Properties of Materials’.
• Our summer term science focus will be spent exploring the life-cycles of animals and humans.

PSHE & RE:

• Each week, the children be engaging in regular class sessions where we discuss important topical issues such as managing our friendships in school and online, how we can express our feelings safely in school and on a wider scale and how we change as we grow up. We are proud to foster a school environment where children feel safe discussing their feelings and emotions in order to develop their confidence and resilience.
• Our robust RE curriculum will focus on the study of Sikhism, where there will be an opportunity for the children to visit a Gurdwara to enrich their knowledge and understanding of the Sikh religion. Our Christianity studies will continue with a deeper look at the meaning of the resurrection and modes of prayer. 

Useful Websites and documents for parents