Year 5 - St Clements C of E Primary School

Pupils & Classes

Teacher: Mr Thirsk, Mrs St-Hill

TA: Miss Thompson

Autumn Term 2025:

In our Literacy lessons we have written an extended Narrative for the book ‘The Promise’ by Nicola Davies. We retold part of the story by writing in the voice of the thief… we have really enjoyed this Literacy unit and were really engaged with the book and explored Nicola Davies’s style as an author, trying to use it in our own writing. Nicola Davies uses figurative language in her writing, we have learnt how to use both personification and pathetic fallacy and be writers who paint with words! Another writing lens we have been focussing on, is creating complex sentences and using them to make our writing more coherent. We have also been working together to provide feedback to help improve our writing further. Are attitude in our writing sessions has been wonderful, and a lot of pupils have even shared their work on the ‘Author’s spot light!’

We have now moved onto our next unit, in which we are going to write a Narrative Biography about an iconic Olympian, and we are focusing on learning how to use a colon to introduce a list or explain, as well as exploring adding relative clauses to a main clause to create another type of complex sentence.

We have made a great start with our Book Talk sessions, talking about what we are reading at home, or discussing reading materials sent home by Mrs St.Hill. We have been working hard on trying to write ‘juicier’ comments in our reading recordings, using the book talk prompts to help us.

We have been working hard on our arithmetic skills, Plus addition, multiplication, division and subtraction. The pupils have a had a big focus on oracy and how they explain their maths.

In R.E we have been exploring why people believe in a God. We have had some very in depth conversations about this topic, and developed an understanding of people’s different views of God – both those who believe and those who do not believe. We also had to find out about the views of staff in our school and our family member’s views.

To finish our unit we had a debate! The class was split into 2 groups – one group represented the Theists and the other group represented the Atheists. The groups had some time to look over previous learning and create arguments to support their arguments for and against God. Mrs St.Hill was extremely impressed with how the children brought their learning together to put forward arguments, and was also proud of how children even though their side may not have been arguing for what they believe, they got into role and supported their group in the debate.

In Art, our unit has been Mosaic Madness! We are really enjoying working through the different parts of our Art Learning Journey: Gathering Inspiration, Exploring – using different media and materials, and Designing our final pieces. We have had fun exploring ancient Mosaic art, from the Roman times…to looking at modern mosaic art. We have been exploring using different media to create mosaics – such as using dry beans/lentils to create natural mosaics. We are now working on designing our own mosaic master pieces… so watch this space!