St John's Church of England Primary School

Autumn Term 2022 Year 5/6 

It has been so lovely to welcome everyone back to the new school year and to see how ready everyone is to tackle their learning and grow as role models.  We have kicked off the year with our ‘Classroom Olympics,’ challenging children to achieve their personal bests in terms of learning behaviours, presentation and quality of work. (Our panel of adjudicators all agree that we have the potential to be gold medalists!)

 As we get to know each other in our new class teams, we are delving into the question ‘Can I build Another Me?’ inspired by the book of the same name by Shinsuke Yoshitake.  We will be learning how to construct a variety of sentence types to weave into our writing in our quest to inform and instruct our robotic replicas. 

 In St John’s tradition, our Healthy Lifestyle Week lies just around the corner and we are very much looking forward to the excitement and energy of Freddy Fit.  In addition to the top-secret special events of this week, we will be focusing on all things health-related in our curriculum over the half term.  As scientists, we’ll be exploring aspects of healthy living, learning about the impact of diet, exercise, drugs and lifestyle on how our bodies function.  We will use our learning about nutrition in our Design Technology challenge to design and make a healthy savoury snack.  Active bodies will be a feature of our weekly menu, with gymnastic coaching delivered by Cerys every Tuesday and our Stockport County coaches leading our PE sessions on Fridays.  Some of our Year 6s will also be swimming on Wednesday afternoons this term – all that exercise should set us up for a good night’s sleep!

 Healthy minds are just as important to us as healthy bodies and we will be finding that feel-good factor as we grow as musicians.  ‘Happy’ by Pharrell Williams, ‘Top of the World’ sung by The Carpenters and ‘Walking on Sunshine’ by Katrina and the Waves are just some of the songs we will explore as we learn more about appraising and composing music with reference to elements such as rhythm, pitch, dynamics and instruments. 

 Keeping safe will be the focus of first unit of computing and as the internet and social media have become such a big part of our lives, we’ll be helping the children to learn how to navigate these things armed with the knowledge and power to make good choices.

 Finally, in our RE this half term, we will be comparing and contrasting 3 major world religions – Christianity, Islam and Judaism.  We will look at key features, such as places of worship, Holy Books and key beliefs, as well as exploring the origins of these faiths and creating a timeline.

There’s no doubt that we’ve got a busy term ahead, but we’re so excited by what lies before us.  It’s already promising to be a fantastic year - we can’t to wait to see where it will take us!

 Miss Finneran,  Miss Hewitt-Lee and Miss Welton