Our First Week in Year 5!

We have enjoyed our first week back at school, and have been excited to welcome some new pupils into our class!

On our first day back, we had the opportunity to catch up with our friends and discuss one thing that we did in the summer holidays. We spoke about some of the topics that we will be covering this year. We went over our classroom expectations and reminded ourselves of how to travel around school safely and responsibly!

Firstly, we looked into our Citizenship themes for this half term. We explored the United Nations Convention on the Rights of The Child and revisited our learning from Year 4 about children’s rights. With our learning partners, we read through the rights and choose which ones we felt related most to our classroom. We then discussed, as a class, which four rights we would choose to uphold as part of our class charter. In our books we explained why the right was important and how both children and adults can respect these rights.

This week, we have also explored our My Place in the World Geography topic with the enquiry question: What is life like in Marylebone? To begin, we spoke about what we think about Marylebone and considered the type of people that might come here, especially to the High Street. To find out more about the lives of people here, we looked at a range of data from the City of Westminster. We looked specifically at the population, diversity, health and wellbeing of the people here. We then had to summarise our findings in writing and explained what life was like in Marylebone. We found out that more men than women live here and generally, people are very happy here! It was really interesting for us to find out about the diversity in the area that we come to school, as we enjoy learning about different cultures and really celebrate our own diversity within school.

We also had our first singing and music lessons with Mr Hylton, using the keyboards. In addition to this, we had our first Catholic Social Teaching lesson of the year. We were focusing on caring for creation. We read scripture from Genesis which reminded us about God’s Creation and the responsibility that humans have of looking after his world. We researched Coldplay’s 2023 tour where they pledged to make carbon conscious decisions in order to reduce their impact on the environment. We found out some strategies that they used, such as re-useable plastics. Our task was to write a speech to our favourite musical artist and encourage them to do the same, referring back to the scripture and stewardship.

Today we started our first shared reading of the year, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. We learned about myths, legends, folklore and fables and had to research a range of different stories. We had to find out which genre they were and which culture they came from.

What was your favourite part of your first week in Year 5?