Literacy

We have been reading the book ‘Survivor’ in Year 5 this term. This story has helped us to understand the perspective of someone running away from a natural disaster and as a result, Year 5 has been able to formulate vocabulary for their own disaster stories. This vocabulary has been used to write a narrative where our protagonist has survived an earthquake and is escaping a tsunami. It is a quest of survival and the children have been able to draw on their previous learning in poetry about figurative language (similes, metaphors and personification) to create imaginative and powerful sentences, which draw their reader in.

Maths

In maths, Year 5 has continued their learning of telling the time and conversions. It has been great seeing the children learning how to tell the time in both analogue and digital forms. We looked at timetable questions and worked out answers using the 12 and 24-hour clock. After this, we moved on to converting between measurements such as grams, kilograms, litres and millilitres. The children used their knowledge of multiplying and dividing by 10, 100 and 1000 in order to do this.

Topic

For our natural disaster topic in Literacy, children used the Now Press Play devices to explore what the people of Pompeii had experienced during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. The main character in the play falls down a well and travels back in time to 24th August 79AD, the day Mount Vesuvius erupted and engulfed the city of Pompeii. The children have been able to empathise with the difficulties and fear the people of Pompeii faced, first, during the earthquake, and then when the river of lava came rushing down the mountain towards them.