What we are learning in Lilac Class for the week beginning

Welcome Back! As I mentioned last week, the children have settled into Year 5 really well. Please keep your eyes open for my Letter to Parents.  This will give you an overview of what your child will be covering during Terms 1 and 2 and homework information.  This year PE for Year 5 will be on Mondays and Fridays, so please ensure your child brings their PE kit in on those days.  The work we will be covering this week is the following:

For Maths in Lilac Class, we are reading Roman Numerals to 1,000.  We will be investigating the patterns we can see in the Roman number system and finding out what letters are used and what they represent.  We will then be moving onto working with numbers up to 10,000, 100,000 and 1,000,000.  Lilac Class are identifying the value of each digit and where it can be located on a place value chart and considering how the value would change if you added a 10, 100, 1,000 or 10,000.

In English this week, we are reading, as a whole school, Something Else by Kathryn Cave and Chris Riddell. Lilac Class will be focusing on the main character’s emotions.  He tries to be like others but is different.  No matter how hard he tries, he just does not belong.

For our Whole Class Guided Reading this term our text is The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S.Lewis.  This week we are reading Chapter One and Two.  Lilac Class are discussing and finding evidence in the text as to why Peter thinks the Professor will let them do what they like, the reasons behind Edmund being in a bad mood and why the children were annoyed it was raining. For Chapter Two, Lilac Class are going to be ‘word detectives’, working out the meanings of unknown words using the context of the sentence.  We will also be using our prediction skills based on what has happened in the text so far. 

In RE this week, we are initially answering our Big Question ‘What does it mean if God is loving and holy?  This is a formative assessment activity and we will re-visit it at the end of this unit so the children and I can see how much they have learnt!  We will then explore the qualities a god should have if people are going to worship this god.  Lilac Class will also be finding out what a ‘divine being’ means. 

For our Time and Place topic entitled ‘The Ancient Mayan Civilisation’ Lilac Class are writing a series of questions about what they would like to find out about the Mayans.  We will then be finding out where Mesoamerica is in the world and what countries today are part of this region.  Lilac Class will learn about how the Ancient Mayan ruins were discovered and what was happening in Mesoamerica in the early 16^th century.   

For Science in Lilac Class, we are describing the Sun, Earth and Moon as spherical bodies and learning about Flat Earth and Spherical Earth theories.  In Music, we will be listening to Venus and Mars from Gustav Holst’s The Planets Suite.  We will be thinking about the different instruments we can hear and what dynamics we can identify.