Friday 15th March

Welcome back to this week’s blog from Year 5F. It has been another busy week. Today school has been a sea of red as we celebrate Comic Relief’s Red Nose Day together. Thank you for all your generous donations which will make a difference to the lives of others around the country.

Maths – This week we have continued investigating fractions. The children have been learning the relationship between improper fractions (where the numerator is bigger than the denominator) and mixed numbers (where there is a whole number and a fraction together).

They began by investigating pictorially. They were able to count how many parts the shape was split into (the denominator) and then how many parts they had altogether (the numerator). This gave them the improper fraction. Next, they counted how many whole shapes they had as well as how many were left over. This then gave them their mixed number.

After that, they then moved on to using a quick and easy method using multiplication and division to convert between the two. This helps to explain the method…

This website has a ‘Pac Man style’ game where you have to eat the improper fraction after converting it from a mixed number…

English – This week the children have ‘boxed up’ the Elf Road story. This involved ‘boxing’ the main events of the story. We do this to help the children to structure their own story when planning. In addition, the children have watched film clips of portal stories, including Harry Potter getting on to Platform 9¾, Alice falling down the rabbit’s hole into Wonderland and Lucy walking through the wardrobe into Narnia. After that, they planned their own portal story.

Also, they have been working on making sentences that contain was or were grammatically correct.

Topic – The children have continued their new topic all about mountains. They have been finding out about different climbers and their attempts to scale famous mountains.

They researched Willy Merkl’s ill-fated attempt to conquer Nanga Parbat (also known as the ‘killer mountain’) in 1934 where sadly 10 climbers - including Merkl - lost their lives to a raging hurricane.

They also found out about Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay’s historic climb in 1953 to become the first people to reach the summit of Mount Everest. At 11.30 am on 29^th May 1953, the two men stood ‘on the top of the world’ at the phenomenal height of 8848m (29029ft)!  

As well, they learned about Pete Schoening’s heroic attempt to climb K2 (the world’s second highest mountain) in August 1953. The team slipped down the mountain and Pete held the weight of them all using a belay around a boulder, then wrapped round an axe handle.

To this day, the expedition remains a shining example of courage.

Finally, they found out about Bear Gryll’s attempt, at the tender age of 23, to conquer the mighty Mount Everest. After three gruelling months, Bear entered the Guinness Book of Records as one of the youngest people to climb Everest and more importantly, return alive!

After all this, they watched a video clip from a climber called Robert Bradley. You can watch for yourself if you follow the link…

They then put themselves into expedition teams and planned their climb up a mountain including a danger and problem they might encounter. The children drew a story board to map it all out. The next step will be to freeze frame their ideas, to produce a photo storyboard of their expedition.

Here is our certificate winner this week. He won forbeing cool, calm and collected in class this week. A big well done from us all.

Did you know that next week is the official start of Spring?  Wednesday 20th March 2019 marks the Spring Equinox. Here's hoping that the weather will improve!

All that remains to say is have a great weekend and we will see you again on Monday.