Year 5 - Summer 2

Welcome back 

WELCOME BACK! 

We hope you  had a fabulous break, and are ready to tackle the final term of the year!! It's come round so fast!

This half term our topic is 'Ancient Greece, this will be mostly a history based unit with some geographical learning and is aimed at developing the children's knowledge of key events during the period . We will revisit some key terms like 'trade', 'civilisation' and 'empire'. We will explore how Alexander the Great created an empire which resulted in encouraging the Greek civilisation to grow. Children will develop their oracy skills and answer questions such as: Who were the ancient Greeks? What was everyday life like? and What did the ancient Greeks do for us?

If you haven't already, please do read through the knowledge organiser with your child – this will help them to understand some of the key information for this term, acknowledge their future learning, build upon prior learning, whilst developing new knowledge and skills. 

Our English focus is 'Leon and the Gorgon's Curse'. This is a adventure text by Joe Todd Stanton will venture into Greek mythology and is the fourth title in the Brownstone's Mythical Collection. It is full of dangerous challenges, cunning monsters and godly heroes, so it's sure to fire up our children's imagination, develop their oracy and inspire their writing skills. We will also be making links to the children's prior learning from Year 2, Year 3 and Year 4 where they have previously learnt about different civilisations, habitats and time periods. 

Within the class activities we will be focussed on building the children's oracy by encouraging each child to find their voice whether that is through debating, explaining, reasoning, working in teams or individually. We will encourage the children to develop their knowledge of subject specific vocabulary whilst also developing an awareness of body language, eye contact and voice intonation. 

In Maths, we will be developing our knowledge of geometry, studying and reasoning about the properties of triangles, quadrilaterals, regular and irregular polygons and 3D shapes. They will also study positions & direction - describing positions on grids, translations, symmetry and reflection.

This half term the children will need to bring their full P.E kit on a WEDNESDAY for their PE sessions.

Weekly reminders:

• This half term, P.E. takes place on WEDNESDAY. Please ensure the children have a kit in school on this day although it is helpful if they remain in school throughout the week in case we need to reschedule and for after school clubs.
• English and Maths homework will be set via Century on Mondays and will be available for a week.
• Spellings are tested on Friday.
• Quick Maths test is on Friday.
• Each day, your child should come to school and come home with their reading book and a library book. They can change these in school as soon as they have been read. Please do encourage them to read regularly and listen to them to read out loud wherever possible.
• Children should also be maintaining their speed and accuracy with their times tables knowledge - Times Tables Rockstars is available for this purpose.

We are looking forward to an exciting half-term together.  As always, if you have any questions or concerns at any time, please do not hesitate to contact myself or Mrs Abbass.

Mrs Whitehurst & Mrs Abbass