Welcome to Class 5 - Foxes

On Wednesday, I took a group of Year 5 students to experience ‘The Open Golf Championships’ at Sandwich. This was an absolutely wonderful experience and the children had a fantastic day. We were able to test out some brand new golf equipment and do some teeing off, putting and chipping. We even had some coaching from female professional Nicola Bennett. Luckily, we saw some of the world’s best golfers play and it was amazing to see them play first hand.

This term, we have been taking part in a range of experiments as part of a study lead by Canterbury Christchurch University. They have all been very hands own investigations trying to answer some 'Big Questions' such as 'Why is the sky blue?

Sports Week 2021

Class 5 had a fun-filled Sports Week and they wholeheartedly took part in every activity. We got to have a taste of some new sports, including: tchoukball, golf, sitting volleyball and cheerleading. We developed new skills, supported each other and excelled in displaying all of the School Games Values: Honesty, Passion, Teamwork, Determination, Respect and Self-Belief.

We started the week by examining previous Olympic medals, designing our own and then making the out of clay. Our designs reflected Japanese culture, Olympic spirit and effective designs. Once painted gold they looked amazing and we were rightfully pleased with them.

Alongside, testing out new sports, we played some inter-house competitions in hockey, handball and rounders which enabled us to really display skills in sports we had learnt this year, show our teamwork skills and competitive nature.

Foxes managed to compete in cross school activities, where their tennis skills were measured and their skipping ability calculated, by timing how many volleys/skips they could do. We had 90 seconds to complete the tennis activities and a 30 second speed skip. We enjoyed the challenge of beating our personal bests.

We were lucky enough to have a sitting volleyball session with Tom Middleton, who has worked with England Handball and the GB sitting volleyball team, he even let us hold his Paralympic torch. We learnt the skills required for the game and played some fun games to put them into practise.

In the classroom, we researched and made Olympic champion fact files on the computer, designed new mascots and even had our very own blow football tournament!

Arts Week 2021

During Arts Week, Class 5 concentrated on learning how to draw using a range of sketching pencils. We studied how to add texture, tone and shading using techniques such as stippling, cross hatching, contour hatching and ink wash.

We looked at the work of the illustrator Axel Scheffler and watched a video of how he created some of his best known characters such as Zog and the Gruffalo – we had a go ourselves.

Continuing to look at different types of drawing, the class looked at the world on Manga and anime. Our focus was facial shape and expressions, we split the face into different shapes and then sections to get proportion and perspective correct.

Throughout the week, we also had a concentrated effort on doing observational drawings of trees and flowers. The aim was to implement the skills that we had learnt about how to include tone and texture. We enjoyed following some online tutorials which were broken into manageable steps and gave the children more confidence in the end result.  The theme of nature was also carried into our artist study whereby we learnt about the works of Georgia O’Keefe and looked at some of her work. We then conducted our own research and created fact pages in our sketch books which included our own representations of her work.

We ended the week by doing a still life class and although some of us found this observational task tricky, we produced some wonderful drawings thinking about where the light was and how to include shade and tone on their drawings.