On Friday, we went to Chichester Festival Theatre to watch the 2015 Children’s music festival.

The Orchestra played some amazing music, including the Overture of the Light Cavalry and the festival was truly entertaining. Brilliantly conducted by Jonathon Willcocks and excellently compered by magician  Neil Henry, who ‘magicked’ the coach away, the children (and adults) sat beautifully through the entire event.

After a brief rehearsal of the audience song ‘Running Order’, the Year 5’s were in splendid voice and action.

During a period of crowd participation, Charlotte was chosen to become a ‘conductor’ (not a bus conductor) and involved an intensive training period in front a full orchestra.

The staff at the theatre were extremely complimentary about the year 5’s behaviour and patience at having to wait such as long time for the coach after the concert finished.

Massive thanks to the parent volunteers who accompanied us for the day. I hope you enjoyed it as much as me!

Mr C

Next week is maths week at St Peters.

I just want to clarify a few uncertainties regarding different times on various days.

On Tuesday (3rd Feb), parents are invited to attend a problem solving workshop in the hall from 10.40-11.25. There is no need to return a reply slip for this event.

The second date is on the Thursday (5th Feb), where parents are also invited into their child’s class to take part in a maths lesson. This event does need to be replied to as there is limited space in each classroom. Teachers therefore need to be aware of how many parents/carers will be attending. The time for this will be 2.10-3.10.

On Friday, children are invited to wear a maths-themed fancy dress costume in exchange for a £2 donation.

I’m already looking forward to seeing some of these creations and desperately wondering what to dress up as myself.

Mr C

Today, four pupils from year 5 went to Portsmouth Junior Grammar School to participate in the year 5 Maths Challenge

This was a challenge for young mathematicians to solve puzzles at six stations.

Working in pairs, they worked through five problems during an eight minute period at each station. The activities during the event consisted of a range of tricky mathematical problems, which tested their skills as mathematicians to the very limit.

The children; Sam Kift, Kallum McCormack, Daisy Lee and Stirling Grout performed brilliantly and finished a very commendable 8th and 15th out of some 32 participating schools. Well Done.

A huge thank you to the parents who attended and I hope you enjoyed it as much as the children.

Welcome back after a well-deserved Christmas break. Our context this half term is Space.

Attached below is the home learning pyramid of suggested tasks that could be completed as part of the context.

I hope the children will be as engaged and enthused by this topic as I am.

Mr Cruddas

Recently, a few children have been explaining that despite completing the activities set on www.activelearnprimary.co.uk, when they log in, it still says that there are activities outstanding. There are a couple of possible explanations:

When viewing the ‘my stuff’ tab, the red number indicates how many activities are outstanding. Often, after completing these, this number stays the same. One course of action to rectify this is to refresh the page. If this doesn’t work, then log out and log in again. If this doesn’t work, see the next picture.

Secondly, after completing any activity, it is important to click the finish icon (as pictured) as opposed to simply exiting the browser using the red cross at the top right hand side of each window.

Once you click this icon, you can then exit the page normally. After which, you should see a confirmation screen with the number of coins rewarded for completing each activity.

I hope this helps and hope equally, that you have a relaxing and restful Christmas break. We will ensure that children are allocated with sufficient homework on abacus, mymaths, and bug club to keep them busy over the festive period.

Merry Christmas,

The Year 5 Team.

Here are copies of the most recent home learning pyramids. This includes one for the WW2 context as well as an Advent one for the current RE unit. Please see home learning diaries for the hand in dates of the advent homework. The WW2 homework is due in on the 19th December.

Here are some extracts from some of the blogs the children in 5C wrote after our trip today;

Today, year 5 visited Southsea’s amazing D-Day museum! We had lots of fantastic fun, learning new things and playing! (Ruby and Talia)

It was an interesting and inspiring place to visit…We looked at the long (Overlord) embroidery, which took five people an amazing five years to make! (James)

We had the experience of acting out a role play, imagining what it would have been like during a bombing raid. (Charlotte and Joseph)

We go to do some fun things including acting and looking at some fascinating historic artefacts from WW2 (Melvin and Ryan)

We got to dress up as evacuees, air raid wardens, messenger boys, woman from the Woman’s Land Army, nurses and fire fighters. It was a fabulous experience. (Tilly and Abraham)

It was a fun day and we wouldn’t have made it without the parent helpers so thanks to them. (William and Kallum)

Pics to follow (Mr C).

Home at last. Just reminiscing on the past few days and it must be said that, on the whole, the children behaved impeccably throughout the three days.

Today, yet again, was a fast paced, busy occasion. Straight after breakfast, we were onto the coach and off to St Paul’s Cathedral. After spending time absorbing the magnificent sights, we then stopped at the nearby YHA for lunch.

After that, a short coach journey to Westminster pier where we nearly caught a CityCruise boat to Greenwich. The walk through Greenwich was a bit rushed as we missed our boat by about 30 seconds and had to wait 25 minutes for the next one to arrive.

I hope the children have been regaling you with stories of their adventures this week and look forward to seeing them all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed tomorrow morning

.

And this one from 24th September

We have had a few children stating they are unable to access the interactive maths games on the abacus website, this will be due to the restriction on the computer towards pop-ups. To allow the pop-ups on this particular website you can either:

1) Click the drop down tab in the right hand corner and select allow pop-ups

2) Hold down the CTRL button and click on the game which will proceed to open it in a new tab.

We hope this is helpful!

From the Year 5 Team.

Firstly, apologies if you’ve been checking in on the year 5 blog and finding it rather barren. Due to a technical error, the previous few year 5 blogs have ended up on the school’s main page.

This one was from 12th September:

As promised in the welcome meeting abacus maths is in action! It is a fun way for children to put in practice what they have been focusing on in maths over the weeks. There are a number of different activities and games on the website which are not only to push children’s learning but are also fun and interactive.

We have loved hearing the children’s enthusiasm for my maths and we hope this will encourage the same and more! A task will be allocated along with my maths for all children to complete each week. There are three stages to choose from on each game, these consist of: bronze, silver and gold. The difficulty increases as the ranks go up which is a chance for the children to challenge themselves independently.

We are looking forward to hearing the children’s response to the website!