Croeso i Flwyddyn Pump

Teacher: Mrs Maunder

P.E. days - Monday and Thursday (please come to school in P.E. kit)

Forest School - Friday afternoon, alternate weeks (Wk 2)

Please click here for our Class Information Leaflet.

Class update

Autumn 2024

25.11.24-6.12.24

Christmas is rapidly approaching and dosbarth 5 continue to be super busy in the classroom. We have now come to the end of our series of online German lessons with the Goethe Institute which the children have thoroughly enjoyed. They are now all able to have a conversation in German involving greetings, goodbyes, colours, animals and food – they are all fantastisch! In literacy, we have been learning about the features of a diary entry and written diaries as if they were writing after a night in the blitz. The writing was wonderful, showing such empathy and understanding of the timer period. In the same vein, we have also analysed the memories of an evacuee to Penallt, creating a character analysis of her background and experiences.  Our enterprise project is now in full swing and we are very grateful for the orders we have already received. To tie in with our topic of World War Two and make do and mend, we are trying to reuse as much as possible. Dosbarth 5 are making rag wreaths, bauble wreaths and small gonks which they are very proud of.  Following on from their initial study of Helen Elliot’s art, we have now begun to draw notable buildings in Trellech using her style, ready for painting.  We have been analysing the weather in Monmouth and creating a database of our results. Have a lovely weekend and we look forward to seeing you at the Christmas service in St Nicholas church in the last week of term.

11.11.24-22.11.24

What a fun filled two weeks of learning we have had in dosbarth 5. We have been incredibly fortunate to join with E-sgol and the Goethe Institute to start our German lessons. We even managed to get our singing of the Auf Weidershen song played to everyone on the course – over 900 pupils across the country! Amazing work! We have now finished our swimming lessons, and everyone has made brilliant progress, through refining techniques and gaining confidence. Our literacy has seen us writing and recording a news reel about the blitz in true 1940’s style. They have focussed on what would make the script suitable for the time period as well as making sure they have used the 5 W’s (who, what, where, when, why). We have also been analysing the features of a diary entry and have planned a diary for a child living through the blitz. Children in Need was a wonderful day for us, running with our reading buddies and creating eco Pudsey’s in forest school. We are incredibly grateful for all your donations and dosbarth 5 ran a total of 210 laps between them.  Using a series of primary sources, we have investigated the roles of the Civil Defence Corps in World War Two, what their job involved and the items they would have needed to complete their job properly. The highlight of our week this week has been the visit to Shire Hall for the sirens and shelters workshop. Many thanks to the PTFA for funding this wonderful opportunity for us.  The children put their investigative skills to the test by analysing sources and trying to match their objects to different people. They were then fortunate enough to go into the underground shelter of the Shire Hall and experience what it would have been like to stay in one and how people fed and entertained themselves whilst there. Our maths has seen us tessellating shapes and exploring 3d shapes and their respective nets.  Using their knowledge of nets, the class have recreated a building in Trellech, having to analyse the 3d shapes of the building and then select/create the nets to make it.  This has made us look very closely at the buildings on our doorstep. We then used this knowledge to help with our expressive arts as we followed a tutorial from Welsh artist Helen Elliot. They used her style of contemporary colourism to draw their own home.  Have a lovely weekend.

21.10.24-8.11.24 

Welcome back after half term, it has been lovely to welcome everyone back to class.  Before half term we began planning a video book trailer for our text we are studying called “Valley of the Lost Secrets”.  We analysed what would make a captivating trailer and would make us want to read the book, then planned out the trailers using a storyboard. This week we have made them come to life using Adobe and AI to create the specific images we needed. The results were fabulous with everyone paying such close attention to the success criteria. In numeracy, we finished our work on timetables and are now more confident in calculating time differences using a timetable. We then moved onto triangles and 2D shapes, learning how to identify them, draw them accurately using a protractor and ruler, tesselate them and reflect them.  Year 5 have definitely been keeping fit and healthy with swimming lessons and Newport County and have even started to design a fitness gadget for the BBC gladiators in a national competition!  For Welsh, we have begun to tell the time, focussing on o’clock, half past, quarter to and quarter past. Using our topic of On Our Doorstep, we have been learning about how ships were targeted during World War Two to disrupt the supply chain. We likened this to the game “Battleships” so year 5 have created their own digital game of battleships using scratch. Their coding skills improved dramatically during the week as they learnt how to code different sprites and turn the screen into a playable game – arddechog blwyddn 5. For science, we have completed the experiment into the solubility of different materials, analysing the results and deciding why we think they dissolved as they did. There were lots of great ideas of how we could change and improve our experiment if we did it again. The children showed themselves to be incredibly respectful with their tributes to Remembrance Day by creating some stunning digital art and blackout poems. Forest school begins next week for dosbarth 5. Have a lovely weekend. 

23.9.24-4.10.24 

It may have been a rather wet fortnight, but it certainly hasn’t dampened the spirits in Dosbarth 5! We have been delving further into the novel “The Valley of the Lost Secrets” by analysing the main characters and writing a letter home as if they were an evacuee. To do this they have understood the process of using paragraphs and how they contain a specific theme or idea. We had some very interesting class discussions about what it would feel like to receive evacuees into our Welsh school as they did in our novel. Numeracy has consolidated our knowledge of subtraction, multiplying and dividing by 10, 100 and 1000 and then multiplying by multiples of 10. It is wonderful to see the enthusiasm in the class for maths and to see everyone’s confidence growing. For humanities, we have been analysing the reasons for the beginning of the Second World War and created information posters to display this. Dosbarth 5 have started to learn German during the last two weeks, identifying the difference between the long “a” and short “a” sound, as well as greeting each other in both formal and informal ways. We have linked our ICT and expressive arts together by learning new photography skills in readiness to take photographs “On Our Doorstep”, to tie in with our topic. We have studied the rule of thirds in composition and experimented with different lighting techniques. Our science lessons have seen us compare the three states of matter – solid, liquid and gas – comparing their differences and similarities.  County in the Community have been teaching us how to eat well by looking at the different food groups as well as planning a balanced meal. Wishing you all a lovely weekend. 

2.9.24-20.9.24 

We have had a wonderful first three weeks of the Autumn term. It has been lovely getting to know everyone properly and settling in to our new year 5 routines.  This terms topic is Ble rwyt ti’n byw? Where do you live? With our class topic ‘On Our Doorstep’. We will be focussing on the current geographical features of Trellech and then stepping back in time to see what would have been on our doorstep during World War Two. The children have come up with some wonderful ideas during our pupil voice sessions on what they would like to learn about during the topic. We have begun in earnest by walking around the village with Dosbarth 6, identifying human and physical geographical features, noting their location and purpose. For literacy, we are reading the novel “The Valley of the Lost Secrets”, set in the Welsh valleys during World War Two. We have begun to map out the characters and the connections they have with each other. On Wednesday we were incredibly lucky to have a live lesson with the author Katherine Rundell on her new novel “Impossible Creatures” which we are reading together at the end of the day. The children gained lots of tips and tricks from such an acclaimed author. Shortly, years 5 and 6 will be launching our Caffi Cynefin so our ICT lessons have focussed on creating advertising using Adobe. These are contained in the newsletter so please take a look and we very much hope you will be able to join us. We have definitely had a healthy start to the year as each Monday we are fortunate to have Newport County football join us to teach us. This week was about strength, stamina and fitness and the sports that require different combinations of these skills. Finally, today we joined our other cluster schools in Usk Primary School for a sports event. Diolch to MonLife for organising such a fun event where the children all got to participate in such a range of exciting activities. Have a lovely weekend.