Take a look at some of the highlights from this term...

Learning and growing together through faith, hope and love.

Year 5 have been really enjoying our class novel - The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe so we decided to build an evacuee scarecrow.

Our year 5 gardeners supported their seeds on their autumn walk on Friday. They discussed and recorded the different signs of autumn that we could spot in our local environment. 

We enjoyed an inspirational afternoon circuit training with paralympian athlete, Antony Cotterill. The story of how he overcame the challenges of his injury and never gave up on his dream of playing sports inspires us to be resilient and persevere with our goals. 

Year 5 have been exploring materials and structures to create bridges. We have investigated how pillars, arches and trusses can be used to strengthen bridges and are now working together in our groups to design a bridge on a 100:1 scale which could span a 30m river, allow two-way traffic to pass whilst allowing a 10m clearance for boats to pass underneath. Our designs must also be sturdy and attractive. 

We can't wait to welcome parents and carers into school to test our models. 

We started our Black History Day by playing a game called equity spaghetti.

We were put into teams and told to build the highest tower we could in 15 minutes. Each team was given 10 pieces of spaghetti, 2 marshmallows, some sticky tape and a pair of scissors, which seemed fair but what we didn’t know was that the coloured cards we were all given would change that.

The green team and the purple team had a card that said they could have as much extra equipment as they needed. They just had to ask.

The yellow and blue teams could also ask for extra equipment but they would have to work for it. They needed to provide a full explanation and the facilitator (Mrs Cook) would decide what they would receive.

The red and orange teams had a card which just wished them luck. They weren’t entitled to any extra equipment.

When we reflected on our task, we weren’t happy that some people were given an advantage over others, simply because they had been given a different coloured card. We had no control over which coloured team we were in, but we were treated differently anyway.

This really helped us to understand how it might feel to be treated differently just because we may have different coloured skin or belong to a minority group.

Mrs Lightbown then asked us why we didn’t complain about the unfair treatment and why the teams who had so much, didn’t choose to mix or share with the other groups. This is when we started to understand how hard it must have been for people to stand up for equality and why some people just accepted groups being treated differently without questioning whether it was right or fair.

We then went on to think about influential black people and how they have shaped the world we live in today. In particular, we learnt about a woman called Mae Jemison who, amongst her many other achievements, was the first black woman in space.

We created some lovely biographies and prayers.

This is Mae Jemison’s message:

‘Never limit yourself because of others’ limited imagination; never limit yourself because of your own limited imagination.’

She encourages everyone to follow their dreams but also to help people to see that their treatment of others can prevent others from following their dreams.

As part of our activity passports, Year 5 said they would like to teach the seeds some new skills. Our seeds have been learning to use the mathematical language 'more than' and 'less than' so we designed some activities to help them with this. 

First, we completed practical activities and then the seeds completed some custom designed sheets to check their understanding. The gardeners also helped the children with counting, number formation and number recognition within 10,