As part of our RE studies in Year 5, today we went on a trip to Shree Laxmi Narayan Mandir temple. We wanted to find out more about Hinduism and understand the place of worship for Hindus. The children had a fascinating time inside this stunning temple and learnt lots about everyday life as a Hindu and met a very wise Hindu priest. We were even lucky enough to witness an Aarti (Hindu prayer session) and took part in a music session too. The children were a credit to their school; both respectful and curious. We’d also like to say a big thank you to the volunteers at this temple- Angali and Dinesh.

For World book day, we spent most of the day doing an Author study about our class author Onjali Q Rauf. We started the day with researching her life and what inspired her to be a children’s author. Then we took the time read our favorites books and discussed and compared her style of writing. In the afternoon, we created a folding paper book all about Onjali. We really studying our class author today!

5H had a fantastic day for World Book Day and enjoyed sharing about their favourite characters and authors. We also completed an author case study about Onjali Rauf, the author of ‘the boy at the back of the class.’ We have become avid readers in 5H and are looking forward to reading our books kindly donated by Friends of Raddlebarn.

On Tuesday Year 5 began their STEAM project linked to our topic of Space. STEAM is a yearly project that children carry out, linked to Science, the Arts and other areas where needed like D&T, Computing and Maths. Through this project the children learn to solve problems in an interdisciplinary way, preparing for real life problem solving which requires critical thinking. There are also links to the Arts which allows for the application of creative thinking and enables artistic skill development. Over two days we will research, develop, plan and create a Stop Motion video with an application of our developed Scientific knowledge. We can’t wait to show them to you!

To conclude an amazing and supportive week focusing on mental health, we created our own support bracelets in Year 5 which showed something we had learnt during the week in class. The children learnt and shared a lot and identified how important connections are.

This week, Year 5 did a story map on an Native American Folk Tale called ‘The Moon’. We then re -told the tale through freeze frames and physical theatre. We really enjoyed this tale as it linked nicely with our Science topic.

Y5 had a parent workshop that focused on space. We learnt about the successful Apollo 11 space mission to the moon, then created a diary entry. We enjoyed finding different ways of making our dairy entries from using stop motion, creating posters and even creating a scrap book!

On Monday, Year 5 had the wonderful opportunity to see a planetarium in school. We saw lots of amazing things from the structure of each planet to seeing the future of what space explorations could look like in 10 years time!