Year 5

Welcome to our Year 5 Class at St James’

Welcome to Year 5 my name is Mr Monaghan and I am the current Class teacher in Year 5. In Year 5 we are supported by a variety of Teaching Assistants. We cover a huge range of topics in Year 5, which the children will undoubtedly love exploring. As well as the World Wars, we delve into the functions of the human body (including the opportunity to dissect a heart), as well as life beyond our planet where we will be unravelling the mysteries of space and our solar system. Within Year 5, learning is not restricted to within the classroom. Children will be offered the wonderful opportunity to perform Shakespeare live on stage, as well as visiting the Youth Village.

There is only one rule in my classroom; try your best. If the children do that, they will thrive and have fun along the way.

Year 5 Noticeboard

Homework is given out each Friday and should be returned for the following Tuesday
Spellings are handed out each Friday and will be tested the following Friday. The spelling rules of that week will be reiterated during school time.
Accelerated reader – The children will read their reading books for 15 minutes every day. The children can take their book home for extra reading, but this must come back in each day ready to read in class.
PE in Year 5 is on Wednesday. Make sure you have your full St James PE kit.
Please bring fresh water daily.
We pray every day in school. Please help your child to become familiar with our prayers here Little Book of Prayers Upper KS2

Year 5 Youth Village Residential

Y5 Residential

Y5 Residential – Final Meeting Apr 25

Year 5 Residential Meeting information 2025

Summer Term in Year 5

This term in Y5 we are reading See Inside your body by Katie Daynes which is an interactive book about the human body. The children will be learning about how the body changes from when they are born, right through to old age and hitting the century mark. This book will also be a stimulus for our Literacy lessons towards the end of the half term.

In Literacy to start with, we are looking at newspaper reports and writing them for particular audiences. The children will also get the chance to present a radio show, and try their hand at live news on the television via an autocue.

In Geography, the children will continue to learn about the natural resources available on our planet, whilst in History, they will be continue to delve into the lives of the early Islamic civilisation.

In Art, they will be finishing their unit on cubism and their study of Picasso, with pretzels on the menu for DT (Yes, this will be done this half term Y5 😊)

As the sun starts to shine through at St James, so too will our lovely Y5 class in the summer term!

Tips on how to help your child’s learning during the Summer Term:

Encourage your children to practise their times tables regularly. This could be five minutes in the car, or a spare few minutes before tea. Times Tables Rockstars is a super app to use. Times tables are so important in every strand of Maths. Our strand in the first few weeks will be measuring angles and position and direction, so this is useful for aspects of that. They can write them out at home and use them in lessons to support their own learning.
Spelling practise this half term needs to remain a key focus for the children. Next year, 20 marks out of the 70 available in the SPAG test (Spelling, punctuation and grammar) are for spellings. Every practise makes a real difference.
Children could start researching anything linked with natural resources on our planet, or anything linked to the human body for Geography and Science.

Spring Term in Year 5

Happy New Year to all of Y5 and their families, I hope you had a great Christmas holiday!

As we enter Spring term, the children will be looking at all things Earth and Space in Science, which will link in nicely with their core text in Literacy, which will be Space Oddity. They will begin the half-term by finishing off their persuasive speech work, and by reading the rest of our class novel, Goodnight Mister Tom. At the end of the book, we will all watch the film together and review it.

The children will continue to learn about the Anglo Saxons and Vikings in History, and will get the opportunity to use our Pray 2gether box, a brand new fun and interactive resource in school for planning Celebration of the Word for our class. They will also get the chance to make their own pretzels, along with their own packaging and logos.

An exciting half-term ahead here in Y5 at St James! Please do also look out for Arbor points given to the children, to see what they have been up to in class.

Tips on how to help your child’s learning during the Spring Term:

Encourage your children to practise their times tables regularly. This could be five minutes in the car, or a spare few minutes before tea. Times Tables Rockstars is a super app to use. Times tables are so important in every strand of Maths. Our strand in the first few weeks will be multiplication and division, so this is vital for that. They can write them out at home and use them in lessons to support their own learning.
Spelling practise this half term needs to be stronger as a class. Next year, 20 marks out of the 70 available in the SPAG test (Spelling, punctuation and grammar) are for spellings. Every practise makes a real difference.
Children could start researching anything linked with space and how Earth fits in within our Solar System. They have already looked at geocentric and heliocentric theories, but anything else will aid them in Science and Literacy this half term.

Its the end of the Spring Term

As this term draws to a close, I want to take this opportunity to say how proud I am of each and every child in Y5. They have all worked so hard and produced some fantastic work as a result. As a teacher, I can’t ask for more than that.

The children watched Goodnight Mr Tom recently to signal the end of our class novel, and Space Oddity replaced it as our core text. This gave the children a chance to write their own full stories with an opening, build up and resolution, as well as a cliffhanger ending, putting together similes and metaphors, direct and indirect speech, and complex sentences along the way.

We also started looking at the early Islamic civilisation in History, and that will be continued after the break. The pretzel making in D&T will now happen in the next few weeks, along with more experiments in Science for materials. The children have learnt that materials can be solids, liquids or gases, and we will be looking at showing how those states of matter can be interchangeable.

As ever, please do take a look at the Arbor app, as I have been awarding points to the children for things each week.

I hope you all have a wonderful and well deserved Easter Holiday filled with special times and I can’t wait for the Summer Term

Autumn Term in Year 5

This half term is unfolding nicely in Year 5, with the children working hard, making progress, and most importantly having fun along the way.

In maths, they have been up and on the move in some fun and engaging Teach Active lessons, consolidating their understanding of things like Roman numerals and place value.

The focus in Literacy recently has been on the life of children pre WW1, and has moved on to diary entries from those soldiers involved in “The Great War.” The children have really been progress with their use of ambitious vocabulary, using expanded noun phrases and persuasive language. All of this comes after their non-chronological reports in their first writing cycle of the Autumn term.

Anglo Saxons have landed on our shores in Year 5 History, with the children learning of the various reasons for the Jutes, Saxons and Angles arriving in Britain, and how they helped shape the country we live in today. This ties in nicely with their Settlements topic in Geography, where the children have been looking at hamlets and villages, towns and cities.

The children have also had the chance to use syncopation in music, coming up with their own beats and rhythms in groups in class, and practising familiar songs with Mr Richardson that use syncopation too. Who knew banging rulers off the desk could help you hit a learning objective in a lesson.

We have visitors in Year 5 until October half-term, with our very own worm hotel in the classroom. The children have been learning lots about earthworms, with the longest being 3 metres long! It is all linked to our animals and plants topic, and the hope is that 8 worms went into the hotel; many more will leave it. The children have learnt about how these worms can reproduce on their own, creating clones of themselves.

The Year 5 children have also been enjoying their PE with new coach Tom; he is already proving to be a great asset for St James.

Tips on how to help your child’s learning during the Autumn Term:

Encourage your children to practise their times tables regularly. This could be five minutes in the car, or a spare few minutes before tea. Times Tables Rockstars is a super app to use. Times tables are so important in every strand of Maths.
When walking around the local Hebburn or Jarrow area, discuss any changes that have happened over the years and the possible reasons why. For example, an old factory could have been replaced with a block of flats, to accommodate a rising population in the area. This will support our Settlements topic in Geography.
Children could start researching all things WWII. We are currently working on WWI, but will be moving on to WWII after half term.

It’s the end of our Autumn Term

It’s been a busy festive period at St James as it always is, with Year 5 playing their part. The Y5 children sang fantastically in the recent Christmas carols performance alongside Year 6, with some notable solo performances from Alexis, Keira, Lucy and Evie.

The children have produced some lovely pieces of art in recent weeks too. As a school, we took part in the nationwide CAFOD competition for “Climate For Change.” In Year 5, we decided to show how amazing our planet is, paralleled with the harmful things happening to our environment and climate. The finished pieces from the children were brilliant. They also finished off their pop art work, using tissue paper to show contrasting colours working together.

A really good term from the children; they have made great progress in a short space of time, in how they interact with each other and how hard they work in class. A massive thank you to all parents and carers for their support in Year 5 so far, and I wish you all a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.