Hello everyone, my name is Mr Hayward and I am the Year 5 class teacher. This year, I will be working alongside Mr Westwood. We are looking forward to supporting the children throughout the Autumn Term of Year 5 and seeing their knowledge and skills grow throughout this year. 

In Year 5, your child is expected to demonstrate increased independence in all areas of the curriculum. They need to become an excellent communicator, who is able to talk about his/her learning and can explain the processes and strategies he/she uses. Working efficiently and collaboratively, will allow your child to maximise his/her potential.

This class page aims to share with you examples of children’s work, photos of the children immersed in their learning. You will also find lots of exciting class news, so please ensure you keep your eye on our class page. 

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask either myself or Mr Westwood and we will do our very best to help you. 

Mr Hayward and Mr Westwood

Autumn Term

Websites to support home learning

Learning Autumn Term

English

This year we will start by reading 'The Boy at the Back of the Class' by Onjali Rauf. This is always a favourite among the year 5 children at Grace Mary and is a real-world fiction book which demonstrates the importance of showing kindness to others. We will add to this by reading other texts by Onjali Rauf, featuring some from our class library. We will also read a wide array of other engaging texts which I am sure the children will love, which will include myths and legends - which link to our humanities topic, non-fiction texts to present new information and some poetry. 

We have just started a piece of writing based on 'FArTHER' a picture book by Grahame Baker-Smith, where we will look into the themes of the story and write our own version using the writing rainbow to show off our best writers voice.

Maths 

This term in maths, we will look at some of the building blocks for future learning. This will include a detailed look at place value to deepen our understanding of number. And next we will move onto looking at the four operations, where we will consolidate known written and mental methods, and also learn new strategies. This will help us to become more confident and efficient mathematicians.

Science

In Autumn term we will be studying Earth and Space. We will look at some of the fundamental building blocks of physics and see how the Earth interacts with other objects in our Solar System. We will supplement our learning with an experiment first used in Ancient Greece by Aristotle. This is always a much-loved topic among our year 5 students. We also be looking at forces and how different forces impact our lives. We were able to conduct an experiment where we made a carriage and a zip-wire to see how friction works to slow down or speed up a moving object.

Humanities

In history, we will be looking at the Viking invasions of the 8th to 11th centuries. We will find out who the Vikings were and make our own opinions as to whether they were really brutal invaders. Then we will be focusing on significant figures such as: King Guthrum and Alfred the Great (the King of Wessex) plus many more. We will then compare some of the rulers of this period and decide who ruled England the best. We will also be looking at Italy. We will use our geographical skills to analyse certain parts of the country and look at how the geographical landscape effects the life of the people who live there. We have also make comparisons between the River Po, and the River Severn.