Friday 29th January

Welcome back to Year 5F’s blog for this week.

Maths – This week we have been investigating reflecting shapes across a vertical, horizontal and diagonal mirror line! How clever is that?

Click on the link below to enjoy finding the matching half of a reflected shape on a mirror line…

Here are some pictures of the children reflecting shapes in class this week...

English – This week we have begun our new class novel The Iron Man by Ted Hughes. The children have been LOVING the story so far! It is an absolute cracker of a book. We have read the first few pages and the children have completed some amazing work based on the story so far. They began the week by drawing a picture of The Iron Man using the clues in the description written in the book. Then, they looked at the cover and the blurb from the book and tried to deduce what might happen in the book, who the main characters were, where the book was set and when the book was set.

The children watched a short film clip which tells the first few pages of the story. Click on the link below to watch it for yourself…

After that, we read a little more of the story and found out that there were two seagulls on the beach, who discovered the broken parts of The Iron Man’s body. The children imagined they were the gulls and wrote a conversation. We have been learning how to use both speech bubbles and speech marks to write dialogue between two characters. Next, the children looked at how Ted Hughes had used similes to describe The Iron Man. The children then wrote their own similes to describe him. Finally, the children have designed their own Iron Man or Woman and annotated their picture with descriptive words and phrases.

Topic – The children have been completing map work this week. They have been learning about the lines of latitude and longitude. These are imaginary lines that run horizontally and vertically across Earth. The children learned that the main latitude lines are the Equator, The Tropic of Capricorn and the Tropic of Cancer.

To understand them, you need to think of Earth as a globe that has been divided into lots of little sections. Some go east. Some go west. Some go north. Some go south.

So you're looking at a map and you want to know where a city or a place is. And you want to tell someone else. How do you do it?

Let's say you want to tell your friend where Paris is.

You could say, "Well, it's in France." That's too general.

You could say, "OK, find the River Seine." That might help.

But what if your friend wants to know exactly where Paris is? You need to use latitude and longitude to help pinpoint its precise location.

Also, the children have also been learning about time zones and how the time changes as the Earth is rotating around. They learned about the main line of longitude called the Prime Meridian. This is what gives us Greenwich Mean Time as this line runs through Greenwich in London.

Science – This week the children have been learning about a very special man called Galileo Galilei. He was an astronomer who lived in 1564. He was born in Pisa, Italy. He invented one of the first telescopes that had 30x more magnification than any others. With this, he was able to view our moon and was the first person to note it was covered in craters. Also, he discovered that Jupiter had moons of its own. The Catholic Church, which was very powerful at that time, believed that the Earth was at the centre of the Solar System (The Geocentric Theory). However, Galileo was able to prove that this wasn’t the case. He believed that it was the Sun at the centre. This is known as the Heliocentric Theory. For his beliefs, he was accused of heresy and placed under house arrest. He died, at the age of 78, in 1642. About 350 years later, in 1992, the Catholic Church finally admitted they were wrong and posthumously granted Galileo a pardon.

Our certificate this week was awarded to Cally for being an absolute trooper! Coming into school all week with a broken wrist, just getting on without complaint.

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