This week in Year 5, we have continued to work incredibly hard across all areas of the curriculum and have enjoyed lots of exciting learning opportunities during our first week back for the final half term. The children have returned with great enthusiasm and a wonderful work ethic.

In Writing, we kicked off a thrilling new topic focused on volcanic eruptions. The children immersed themselves in the dramatic sights and sounds of a volcano to help them generate sophisticated expanded noun phrases. They worked hard to capture the intense atmosphere, thinking carefully about high-impact verbs and vocabulary to describe what they could see, hear, and feel. We will be using these brilliant ideas to write our own explosive descriptive paragraphs next week.

In Maths, we have been continuing our focus on decimals with a particular look at adding and subtracting. The children practised accurately aligning decimal places and using placeholders when working with numbers of different lengths. They developed their problem-solving and reasoning skills by tackling multi-step word problems and correcting deliberate mistakes. We were particularly impressed with the resilience shown when handling some of these trickier challenges.

In Topic, we launched our new geography learning by exploring the structural layers of the Earth. The children worked collaboratively in teams to create 3D cross-sections of the planet using colorful playdough. Through this hands-on activity, they learnt to identify and label the crust, mantle, outer core, and solid inner core. They used their models to explain some complex scientific ideas about tectonic movement and how the intense heat and pressure deep inside the Earth can trigger an eruption.