Welcome to Squirrel Class

Meet the team...

Miss Tara Cross
(Teacher)
 

Mrs Laura Tatum
Mrs Jade O'Reilly
Mrs Sue Evans
Mrs Dora Balugas
Mrs Avril Evans
(Teaching Assistants)

General Information...

PE

PE will be on a Tuesday afternoon.  Please make sure your child comes to school in their PE kits on a Tuesday.

Water bottles

Please ensure your child comes to school with a filled water bottle; we are able to refill these during the day.  Please encourage your child to bring water only.

Tuck

Tuck will be available for children everyday for 50p. A variety of snacks will be available - from fruit and yoghurt to sausage and bacon rolls. Please encourage children to bring their money in a sealed envelope, these are available at the front office.

Homework

Homework is always given out on a Friday and due back in the Friday after. Most learning is related to what we have been working on that week in class, so please let us know if your child struggles at all. Listening to your child read is really important - children are expected to read every day and log it in their reading record. Please write in their record when you have heard them read too.

Our Curriculum:

We’ve had an amazing time during Countryside Week!

On Monday, we learnt all about machinery with Ollie and Ian. We asked them questions about their tractors, drill and plough and linked this to what we’ve learnt in science this year about pulleys, gears and levers. They also taught us all about what they grow on the farm and how and when it’s all harvested.

On Tuesday, we had a lot of fun trying out air rifle shooting! We all had ten pellets to shoot and had different targets we could aim for. It was great fun! We did our own research to find out more about shooting as an Olympic sport in preparation for the games this summer in Paris. We found out some brilliant facts which we have shared on our posters.

On Wednesday, we completed the treasure trail set by Mrs Arnold. This was super challenging but we made it to the end! We also all had a go at the ‘guess the picture’ challenge - another tricky task for us to get our heads around!

On Thursday, we had the tree-mendous opportunity of visiting the paulownia tree plantation on Euston farm! Not only did we get to stand within the trees and get up-close to see them with our own eyes, we also learnt some amazing information about them too. These trees are the fastest growing in the world and they can capture 25kg of carbon a year! We had a great time. To reflect on our learning, as a class we created our own paulownia tree plantation design with a fact on each leaf of each tree!

On Friday, we shared our learning in our outdoor collective worship and then got to meet one ewe and her three lambs! We asked some fantastic questions which farmer Chris was blown away by. What an incredible week we have had filled with opportunities and immersive learning!

Lots of us love author Hannah Gold’s books ‘The Last Bear’ and ‘The Lost Whale’, so we took part in her live event to learn more about her new book ‘Finding Bear!’ We are reading Shackleton’s Journey based in Antarctica and will be learning about biomes across the world in Geography, so we learnt a lot about the polar desert landscape and animals that live there from Hannah Gold. We can’t wait to read the new book!

In RE we have been learning about ‘good news’ and what the gospel means to Christians. We learnt lots from Vicar Cat about St Gregory’s church and the meaning behind its features.

In PSHE we are learning about collaboration and compromise. To work on our team work skills, the class were put into groups and set the challenge of creating the tallest tower they could using only newspaper and cello tape!

In maths we are learning about place value. We did some activities to help consolidate our learning!

We read two great stories in our first few days in Year 5 all about working together as a class and about each of us having our own talents. We also made kites where we wrote about our aims for the year ahead. We then flew them outside as we are aiming high this year!

Unfortunately, the coach didn’t arrive to take us swimming for our first lesson, so instead we had some fun on the scooters! An energetic morning was still had!

In Science we are looking at materials and their properties. Firstly, we had to sort objects into categories to decide whether they were a solid, liquid or gas.

Next, we had to feel inside a bag and describe the properties of the objects to our groups to guess what they were. Some were flexible, waterproof, rough, heavy…

We then did an experiment to test whether they were flexible, permeable, hard and transparent.