21 May – Culture and Identity

We have continued to use Floella Benjamin’s biography ‘Coming to England’ as the inspiration for our writing this week. The children have produced ‘mini fact files’ exploring their culture and identity. Using the song ‘This Is Me’ from The Greatest Showman, we have had some super discussions about the value of diversity and the importance of ‘being me’. They have shown fantastic empathy by writing letters to Floella, sympathising with the difficulties she faced when coming to England, as well as looking at the events in her biography from the perspective of her mother. Armed with their new knowledge that per cent means ‘number of parts per hundred’, Year 5 have been solving problems involving fractions, decimals and percentages with great confidence. They are growing ever more fluent in the various representations they can use to help them understand these abstract concepts, such as bar models. On Thursday, the children were challenged to show off everything they had learnt in French over the past 6 weeks. Their enthusiasm was infectious and they were able to read, write and speak simple sentences when talking about pets. Next week is ‘Art and DT’ week and Year 5 is looking forward to a fun and creative pottery project to end this half term with.

Kind regards,
Mrs Hunter