Well done to all the Year 5 children who are reading multiple times at home every week.
Congratulations to all who have achieved their bronze award already!
On Thursday 16th November, we will be hosting a parent workshop explaining how we teach handwriting at St Alban’s.
From the first day of school, we pay particular attention to good writing habits. By the end of the session you will know what we mean by BBC, TNT and lots of other useful tips.
We look forward to welcoming you in the school hall at 2:15pm. Grandparents are also welcome.
Thank you,
Mrs Gurner
Yesterday, Year 5 continued finding out about forces. They had a piece of card to hold in front of them and ran across the playground and back. This started our discussion on air resistance.
Air pushes back against the piece of card so it is harder to run. This force is called air resistance.
We dropped two pieces of paper the same size, one scrunched up and one not.
The scrunched up piece of paper, fell more quickly than the flat piece of paper.
This is because the surface area of the scrunched up piece of paper is smaller and so there is less air resistance.
Today, we represented square numbers using counters.
A square number is the result of multiplying a number by itself.
Today, Year 5 began this year’s geography fieldwork project.
Fieldwork is when you go outside the classroom and find things out for yourself.
We wanted to find out the answer to a question. Does Morthen road need a zebra crossing?
So, all day we have been going out in groups to count the traffic on Morthen Road. We went out for ten minutes every hour and created tally charts to record our results. This is called time sampling. We will interrogate our results and use them to answer our question.
What happens to a ball when we drop it?
We discussed the Hypothesis:
When I drop a large ball and a small ball from the landing, the balls will hit the floor at the same time.
Some of us thought that a large ball would fall faster than a small ball, some of us thought the small ball would fall faster. Some of us thought the balls would fall at the same rate.
We dropped the balls and discussed the results.
Galileo discovered that everything falls at the same speed. In 1658 he dropped two balls of different masses from the leaning tower of Pisa. He discovered they hit the ground at the same time.
Recently in Year 5, we have been observing the life-cycle changes in a variety of plants. We began by retrieving what we knew about seed formation and seed dispersal from our learning in Year 3. We discussed how different plants dispersed their seeds.
Dispersal is the spreading of things over a wide area. Dispersal of seeds is very important for the survival of plant species. If plants grow too closely together, they have to compete for light, water and nutrients from the soil. Seed dispersal allows plants to spread out from a wide area and avoid competing with one another for the same resources.
When dandelion seeds break free from the flower head, these bundles of hairs catch the wind and carry their seeds.
The Himalayan balsam seedpods explode when touched or shaken.
Structures
Structures come in many forms, both natural and manufactured. Our own skeletons are structures as are trees and plants. Manufactured structures, including, bridges, cars, buildings and furniture are all around us in the made world.
Structural Engineers must ensure their designs are safe. They use their knowledge of construction, materials, physics and mathematics.
The purpose of a structure is to:
carry the loads for which they were designed
do so without collapsing or breaking in use
hold all parts together in position
Framed structures
A framed structure in any material is one that is made stable by a skeleton that is able to stand by itself as a rigid structure without depending on floors or walls.
Today, Year 5 continued our Design Technology Project – frame structures. We decided to make bird hides for Year 5 to watch wildlife.
We have already completed investigative and evaluative activities where we investigated and make annotated drawings of a range of portable and permanent frame structures. Then we completed focused practical tasks based on techniques for joining frameworks. Next, we designed and made a small scale frame structure.
He are a few of our small scale frames.
Today, we started creating our full scale bird hides.
Now we need to critically evaluate our bird hides against our design specification, intended user and purpose.
Check out our new reading bookmarks. These will be given to the children who have achieved the Reading Governor’s Award.
Each year the children will receive a different colour- try and collect them all!
Yellow – Reception
Green – Year One
Royal Blue – Year Two
Red- Year Three
Navy – Year Four
Purple – Year Five
Black – Year Six
Separating mixtures
We use sieves to separate things. A sieve has holes of a certain size. You can use sieves to separate two substances with different sized bits or particles. As long as you choose the right sieve, one substance will go through the holes and one will not.
We had a mixture of flour, rice and pasta.
We separated the flour, rice and pasta using different sized sieves.
We used a magnet to separate the plastic counters and metal paperclips.
