Please see below for some examples of the amazing work we've been doing!

The Spring term has brought a welcome return to some of the activities that have been on hold for so long and the children have thoroughly enjoyed getting out and about and trying new things. We had a great day at the River Thames in support of our learning about rivers in Geography and the steady afternoon rain did not dampen spirits at all. The children loved the hands-on learning and carried out an assortment of scientific tests before finding so many creatures living in the shallows that they could definitely conclude that the Thames was a clean and healthy habitat.

World Book Day was celebrated in style with a fabulous range of characters and two joint workshops with Year 6 delivered by author Georgia Byng. The children listened intently to her tips on describing characters and loved hearing ideas about how to improve their writing from a highly successful author. Georgia’s Molly Moon books have sold millions of copies around the world and it was touching to be shown a Ukrainian edition of one of the books which had been illustrated by a local artist. The day also featured a Lowther first: a Book Tasting session. The children enthusiastically moved around the classroom trying different genres of books on different tables and several new books were later being read as a result.

We have also been rehearsing hard for our appearance in the Barnes Music Festival and are grateful to Mr Gradidge for giving Year 5 the opportunity to take part, rather than sending the school choir. It has been lovely to see and hear every member of the class singing well and it should be a great experience for them to perform in front of a large audience at St Paul’s Wathen Hall.

Year 5 have been learning about fractions and decimals in Maths, helped by the use of some post-Christmas Terry’s Chocolate Oranges. With 20 segments per orange, combining two of them offered an ideal way of demonstrating improper fractions and also managed to sharpen the focus in the classroom to impressive levels… Using physical resources is an important part of the White Rose maths scheme which the school follows and that, together with the pictorial and the abstract, has helped the children to gain an impressive understanding of fractions and decimals. Later in the term we will move on to percentages and learn how to combine all three systems.

In English, we paused our study of The Highwayman to take part in the Screen Your Story competition, with a concentrated focus on writing. The children responded enthusiastically to the theme of Saving the Planet, and applied themselves well to researching, planning, drafting and editing their 500-word stories. The standard was high and there looked to be a number of possible winners among the class entries, so we will look forward eagerly to hearing the results in the spring.

We have begun to learn about classifying, mixing and separating materials in Science, as well as taking part in the Big Garden Birdwatch for homework, and have produced some fabulous murals in Art to tie in with our study of the Mayan civilisation in History.

Year 5 have had a really busy second half of the autumn term so far and have stepped up to meet the challenges of a wide range of activities.

Our work on poetic style in English at the start of November produced some fabulous writing, with the children using similes, metaphors, alliteration, onomatopoeia and personification to great effect. Top-quality writing was also on display in our first Phase Write-Off of the year, when the Year 6 children found it tough to choose between two excellent Greek myths written in Year 5. Just a handful of votes separated first and second place. We have now moved on to study Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and the year group’s celebrated strengths in drama have already come to the fore and provided several chilling portrayals of Ebenezer Scrooge.

In Maths we have worked with factors, multiples, square and cube numbers and have been revising multiplying and dividing by 10 and its multiples. Six of the group also joined the Year 6 children to take part in the national Primary Maths Challenge and did very well having joined the competition a year early.

We have begun learning about the Mayans in History and cross-curricular links with cooking have enabled us to taste a range of tasty food that would have been produced in Central America 4,000 years ago. Takeover Day featured four very high-quality Art lessons and in Music our first workshop with Mark Wilderspin was a tremendous success. The director of music at St Paul’s will be incorporating the children’s ideas in his own composition, which we will be performing with a number of other schools next year.

Nine members of the class represented the school strongly in cross country, coming in for early-morning training and reaping their reward when they did extremely well running against hundreds of other children in Richmond Park. We have also been learning rugby skills in PE, swimming at St Paul’s and running the Daily Mile. It has been great to see such a fit and healthy group of children learning new skills and pushing themselves in so many different areas.

Black History Month was celebrated enthusiastically by Year 5, who as a typical multicultural Lowther class were keen to learn about one of Britain’s oldest multicultural communities. We studied the history of Tiger Bay in Cardiff, where immigrants settled from the 1850s, and learned how one of its most famous daughters, Betty Campbell, overcame prejudice and adversity.

The children learned about Betty’s remarkable achievement in becoming the first black head teacher in Wales and wrote poems to celebrate her accomplishments. They also drew some very good sketches of the statue which was unveiled in her honour last month and delivered an excellent presentation about their learning in our Welcome Back Assembly.

In English the children worked hard on an extended piece of writing as they created their own Greek myths, while in Maths they did well in statistics, drawing line graphs and learning how to read timetables.

Our study of Space and the Solar System in Science was reinforced with some cross-curricular learning in Computing lessons, when the children enjoyed using Scratch to create and programme their own animations featuring rockets heading to distant planets.

Year 5 have had an excellent start to their year, we’re looking forward to continuing the great work.

Year 5 have started the year with great enthusiasm and really thrown themselves into our work on Ancient Greece. Learning about Greek myths and legends in English allowed the children to show off their excellent acting skills with performances of Theseus and the Minotaur in class. They then moved on to write their own playscripts telling the story of Daedalus and Icarus, the boy who flew too close to the sun. In History we have learned about the rivalry between Athens and Sparta and the Greek gods and goddesses, while the quality of the many models made as homework has been tremendous. The children have also been enjoying listening to our class novel, Who Let the Gods Out by Maz Evans.

In Maths we have been consolidating our understanding of number and place value and are now moving on to formal methods of calculation.

Our Science work has included learning about the orbits of the Earth, Sun and Moon while in PE we have improved our passing and movement skills in netball. There has been plenty of active learning, with the children working to improve their fitness in the Daily Mile and relishing the return to swimming at St Paul's for the first time since Year 3. After that long a gap there were understandably a few nerves before our first session, but the way the class worked together and encouraged everyone to do their best was superb.