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Welcome to Year 5! Mr Carey is the class teacher, who is supported by Miss Ogden.
Year 5 will be working very hard this year, but will have lots of fun, too. We will be historians and scientists, mathematicians and writers, artists and speakers of French!
Homework
Homework will be increased this year as we begin to prepare your child for Year 6 and high school. Maths homework will be given out every FRIDAY and must be returned by the following Friday for peer marking. The aim of this is to allow the children to collaborate in working out answers and share methods. Spellings will also be given out on this day and the children will be tested at the end of each week.
This year, school has purchased a new online learning platform known as Learning By Questions (LBQ). You may have seen some pieces of homework using this platform already, as we have been experimenting with it throughout the term.
As well as supporting your child with their maths work and spellings, we also ask that you keep up with hearing your child read at home, at least three times a week. Reading books will be taken in whenever it has been read and these books will be changed straight away. Reading is monitored and if a child has not completed any reading within the week, they will do so in their own time at school.
We have found a VERY strong correlation between those children who read regularly at home and those children who achieve higher scores in their reading assessments. Reading expands children’s knowledge of words and their understanding of different genres of writing. This in turn, helps them with their reading comprehension.
Children who read a lot at home, are also more able to use their reading experiences to help their writing – they have more ideas and are more familiar with different grammar structures, vocabulary and spelling. It is a very important skill to have – not just for SATs, but for life.
TTRockstars is also available for children to use to keep their Times Tables knowledge fresh in their head. Even in Year 5, we find that there are still children in class who are not confident with their Times Tables knowledge, and as they have found, this affects many maths concepts; not just multiplication, but division, fractions, ratio, algebra etc. Even if your child knows their times tables, it is important that they still practise on TTRockstars, so that they are quick as well as confident.
Attendance
It is essential that your child attends school every day and on time. The curriculum moves at a very fast pace in Year 5 and even being absent for a couple of days could mean that full topics are missed. Children who are absent for long periods find it difficult to catch up with things that they have missed, and regular absences mean that topics are never being fully covered, which leads to gaps in your child’s knowledge.
The day starts for Year 5 at 8.50am and finishes at 3.30pm.
Lessons will start straight away, so pupils need to arrive promptly to ensure that they don’t miss anything.
Reading:
Children will be given a reading book to read at home. They need to have their Reading Records signed by a parent or carer each time they have read at home. It is expected that children in Year 6 read for at least 20 minutes each evening. As Year 6 children often read longer books or novels, they will be changed as and when required. We do not expect pupils to read a whole book every week, but we do expect them to read at least three times per week. Reading Records will be monitored daily and if a pupil has not handed in a signed Reading Record by the end of each week, they will be asked to do some reading in class during their free time on Friday.
My Happy Mind
Your child’s wellbeing is important to us and we have started an amazing scheme to educate and support them with understanding their big emotions. This term we are learning about our relationships with others and how positive relationships can improve our mental health and well-being.
