Autumn

Transfiguring our writing 

We have edited and redrafted our first sights of Hogwart's, using Year 5 and 6 CEW and thinking about sentence openers and our language choices. Look out for floating candles and more magic coming to the Harry Potter room (group room 2) soon...

We really enjoyed decorating our Hogwart's Christmas tree!

Enterprise 

Year 5 are looking forward to welcoming you to the Christmas Fair next Friday. We have had lots of fun making our own Harry Potter owls! 

Newburn Noel Chutney

Hannah Reay from 'The Pickle Palace' spent a morning with us talking about food waste, sustainability, the difference between best before and use by labels and making spiced apple chutney with everyone. The Pickle Palace is a local charity which rescues food and feeds people struggling with the cost of living in west Gateshead. Open to all, they aim to help the most vulnerable and those who wish to live a more sustainable and eco-friendly life. They also offer education to help people think about and see food differently, eat better and waste less and we had a fantastic time cooking with Hannah. We developed our chopping, cutting, slicing, cleaning, grating and many more cookery skills whilst making a delicious Christmas chutney, look out for some on sale in the Christmas Fair next Friday! 

Visit The Pickle Palace for more information about what they do in the Community. 

Spanish 

We continued learning facts about space and the planets in Spanish and extended our sentences to include some details about our favourite planets. 

After designing our own potions and writing instructions about how to make them, we made some using lots of different ingredients. Ask us what our potion does. 

Children in Need 2025

Thank you to everyone for your contributions and kindness today. The children have raised lots of money for Children in Need and have taken part in various activities. Thank you for helping and for supporting us. 

Geography - going to the Amazon

Coinciding with COP30 taking place in Belem, Brazil, Year 5 took part in a zoom call with some people from the Kambeba indigenous community in the heart of the Amazon who were there. We were part of four schools who took part and Marcella, who has lived amongst the tribe, joined us virtually from London and Chico, the chief of the Aldeia Tururukari-uka tribe, from COP30 half-way through the session as well. This was led by Emma Espley, who used digimaps to help us to locate all of our schools and we explored what Brazil was like and where the Amazon was located. Next, Marcella shared her and Emma's story ‘A day spent with the Kambebas‘ and we learnt about living in the Amazon. Children had an opportunity to 'hot seat' Marcella. Chico was in Belem and the children were able to ask him questions. Emma set the children a writing task, This aligned strongly with the foci of the 2025 Writing Framework; quality over quantity and the integration of tier 2 and tier 3 vocabulary into writing. 

'Why is it important that we all act to preserve the tropical rainforest ecosystem in places like Amazonas in Brazil?' We are looking forward to continuing our Rainforest Geography topic and to learn more over the coming weeks. 

Visiting Space in Spanish! 

We are using our knowledge and learning about Space from our Science topic to develop our Spanish vocabulary and sentence construction and are talking about planets in Spanish. Ask us what our favourite planet is! 

Our new book!

Welcome back to week 1 of our second half term! We have been busy with our potion writing this week - look out for the corridor to be lit up with even more of your amazing writing Year 5... some fantastic spells created this week and congratulations on achieving 97% in your weekly spelling! Lots of potion making has been going on at home over half term and it sounds as though all you witches and wizards have had a good Halloween. In PHSE this week, we have been learning about bonfire safety and the Gunpowder plot and on ThursdayVerseday we created our own bonfire poems. Our PE topic this half term is rugby and you did very well in your fundamentals. In Geography we are journeying to the Rainforest and in Science learning about living things and habitats, we are looking forward to meeting people in the Amazon next Wednesday... Our new class text is, 'The Explorer' by Katherine Rundell  and we can't wait to get exploring! 

Open the Book

We took part in, 'Open the Book.' The story was, 'Storm on a Lake' and we enjoyed acting each part. 

Stephen Wiltshire drawing from memory. 

What better than to end our book this half term with a game of Quidditch! Our seekers competed to see and catch the golden snitch, we had points scored with the quaffle, our goal keepers worked hard and we had to look out for those bludgers! Well done to all house teams today. 

We created platform 9 and 3/4 with our VIPERS reading responses and have enjoyed performing 'Something Wicked This Way Comes'. Ask us about how we have been developing our Vocabulary, Inference, Prediction, Explanation, Retrieval and Summarising skills as we have been reading Harry Potter this half term. 

We had fun in our Harry Potter yoga session!

Computing 

We compared websites and created our own, we enjoyed learning about computer systems and networks and how websites are ranked. 

Art Week

During art week we explored the work of artist Stephen Wiltshire and developed our sketching techniques. We then applied our art skills in our space topic. 

"Anything from the trolley dears?"

As we were reading about Harry's journey on the Hogwart's Express, the trolley witch appeared and gave us all Hogwarts themed cakes! They were delicious! 

We explored who the Ancient Maya were, where did they live? What were their cities like?  We revisited using an atlas and refreshed our knowledge of continents and Countries. We developed our non-fiction reading skills and talked about what different clues showed us about how they might have lived. Ask us what we have found out so far!

We enjoyed sketching and painting the Whomping Willow and Hogwarts in autumn. We compared poems and performed some then wrote our own using kennings, our senses, similes, metaphors, personification, alliteration, onomatopoeia, and some of the poetic devices we had spotted and liked in the poems that we had shared. Every Thursday is ThursdayVerseday where we spend a short time exploring poets or poetry around a theme and we have enjoyed immersing ourselves in poetry. 

On Wednesday 17th September we became astronauts! Thank you for your patience at how long it took us to return from space! We had a fantastic day and learned a lot. 

We didn't need broomsticks to blast off into space today! We loved learning all about space in our planetarium workshop and exploring the Centre of Life. 

We had fun sorting ourselves into houses. 

Astronomy 

We have been learning about the planets and used our non-fiction reading skills to sort planets, order them, find the differences between objects in space and to share facts that we found interesting. 

Samba!

We have started a samba band, led by Steve and Jay from Newcastle Music Service, and are looking forward to learning lots about samba and performing in a few weeks. 

Whilst Professor Trelawney is temporarily unavailable for divination due to unforseen circumstances, Mrs Miller is teaching Muggle Places of Worship. This week, Fifth Years explored how appearance and layout of a place of worship expresses the beliefs of a faith community. They found out what things are found in religious buildings and what meanings they convey to believers. They listed words to describe religious buildings and located a variety of famous religious buildings around the world, from ornate to simple, traditional to unusual. 

Most of us are remembering our times tables classroom password every day... Remember Fifth Years, keep logging on to TTRS and practise your tables. 

We Created a Class Charter together and our class Aurors have been busy in Defence Against the Dark Arts in ensuring that everyone's cauldron is full and we are earning lots of points and butterbeers! Well done to Elodie and Ayrton for already achieving a trip to Honeyduke's! 

Welcome back to school Year Five! 

Harry Potter...

Harry Potter has arrived at Newburn! We enjoyed starting our class text for this half term today and creating our own Hogwarts inspired coat of arms in PHSE about ourselves. 

Have you filled a cauldron today? 

During potions, we decorated a cauldron each and will be filling them for each other throughout each week with kind messages and thanks and once a week will take all our messages home. 

PE

After a wet lunchtime put a hold to playing quidditch, we had a dodge ball tournament. Gryffindor won initially but then Slytherin and Hufflepuff teamed up to dodge, throw and defeat the others with some spectacular catches from Ravenclaw ensuring that they too won a match and lots of fun was had.