We cannot believe we are at the end of our first term already and what a fantastic, busy term we have had!  We want to start by saying a huge da iawn to all of Year 5, we are all so proud of how well they have settled back into school and their excitement and enthusiasm for their learning has been brilliant! Keep up the amazing work Year 5!

Vile Victorians

Throughout Autumn Term, Year 5 have been busy becoming historical investigators as we have begun to explore the Industrial Revolution through our topic ‘Vile Victorians’. Children have enjoyed learning all about the vile jobs carried out during the Victorian Era. (Ask them about Pure Finding, I’m sure they would love to tell you all about it!) We then used our research to create eye-catching, persuasive job adverts. Alongside this, we have also learnt all about how Britain changed during the Industrial Revolution as we explored; the move from Urban to Rural Britain, the invention of the steam engine and Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s many inventions. Many of Y5 were even lucky enough to work with Miss Shepherd. who has shared her fantastic ICT skills, to help us create animations that celebrate our learning about the Industrial Revolution so far! Despite the typical Welsh weather, we have also been taking our learning outside this term and we have created life size timelines, to help us learn about some of the significant events of the Industrial Revolution.

We have even linked our theme to our English this term, as we have been reading ‘Street Child’ by Berlie Doherty. We are really enjoying the story so far and can’t wait to find out what happens to the main character Jim as he escapes from the dreaded workhouse! We have also really enjoyed learning about Victorian Workhouses, we can’t quite believe how horrible they were and we are all feeling extremely lucky that we don’t have to work and live in workhouses today! 

Teaching Live with Pie Corbett

Alongside our exciting topic, we have been extremely fortunate this term as every Thursday, we have been taking part in live lessons with Pie Corbett. Pie Corbett is an English educational trainer, writer, author and poet who has written more than two hundred books. He has a fantastic imagination and love for writing which he has passed onto children all around the country. Every Thursday morning, we log in to a live zoom call with Pie and over 40 other schools around the country, we complete a wide range of writing activities and can share our ideas with over 2000 other students through live padlet and jotcast activities! Why not log on to teachinglive.net to view some of our completed blog entries? If you are really impressed with our writing (which we know you will be) you can even leave a comment on our work! So far, we have written a wide range of poetry and are just beginning to move onto story writing! We are looking forward to continuing our online learning over the next 6 weeks.

Harvest Festival

Autumn term is always a special and exciting term as we celebrate our Harvest Festival. Although this year was slightly different for us all, we still thoroughly enjoyed our ‘Virtual Harvest’. Y5BD/RHP turned into artists and produced some excellent sketches of pumpkins during a ‘draw along’ session, their shading with oil pastels was brilliant! Y5BH turned musical as they learnt and performed ‘Cauliflowers Fluffly’ on the glockenspiels and Y5HC became rap artists as they performed and created a music video for ‘The Vegetable Rap’. We all had lots of fun and enjoyed sharing our celebrations with the rest of the school. A huge diolch for all of your generous harvest donations, we collected a great amount of food for the Raven House Trust. This will help so many people in need this year and this wouldn’t have been possible without you so diolch yn fawr!

PC Hartshorne’s Visit
If Autumn term wasn’t already packed full of exciting learning, Y5BH and Y5HC also had their first visit from our new Police Liaison officer, PC Hartshorne. PC Hartshorne talked to us about anti-social behaviour, what it means to be anti-social and how we can ensure we are being respectful when we are out with our friends. It was a really interesting session and gave us lots to think about as we get older! PC Hartshorne will be back after half term to deliver the session to Y5BD/RHP too!

Black History Month
October is ‘Black History Month’. We have enjoyed learning about lots of influential black people throughout history. We learnt about Pablo Fanque and his fantastic circus shows, as well as Mary Seacole and how she risked her life to save others during the Crimean War. We really enjoyed reading the Black History Month booklets created by the residents of Glyn Anwen too! They taught us so much about so many influential black welsh people, including Betty Campbell, the first black headteacher in Wales.

All that is left for us to say is, have a wonderful, restful half term! We look forward to seeing you all for another exciting term on Monday 2nd November!