Welcome to the Antarctica Year 5 Class Page. Here, you can find out about everything that we've been doing this term.
Friday 31st March
What a fantastic final week of term we have had in Antarctica!
This week, we had a visit from Prayer Spaces where we learned more about the Easter story. We had the chance to complete some art and craft activities and learn some more about what happened on the lead up to the Resurrection of Jesus.
Tuesday afternoon was our long-awaited Easter egg decorating competition. We all produced some fabulous eggs – it was so tricky to choose a winner! Well done to Kaysha, Fin and Lenny for producing our top three eggs. I’m sure we can all agree that we had a fantastic selection.
On Wednesday, it was time for the long-awaited Dance Festival. After an afternoon of rehearsing, a group of excitable children (and teachers!) set off to The Sage for our evening. It was incredible to see the other schools perform.
‘Emmaville Does Moana’ was a brilliant performance – I’m sure anybody who attended will agree that we did so well (and the roaring applause was well deserved!)
As always, the children of Emmaville Primary were well behaved, polite and represented our school perfectly. Well done to everybody who was involved - you certainly did us all proud!
We have now created our final pieces for our Chinese Guohua art topic – and they are incredible! Using all of the skills we had been taught, we have created a picture with bamboo, dragonflies and sparrows. We really are artists in Antarctica, we have done brilliantly with this work.
The Easter holidays are most definitely well deserved! Miss McKean can’t wait to hear what we have all been up to. Stay safe, have fun, and we will see you all back again on April 17th.
This week has been Enterprise Week at Emmaville, which meant that we had the opportunity to take part in a lot of fun activities! It was such a busy week, we all deserve a rest this weekend.
On Monday, we were given a workshop from As Creatives all about Katherine Johnson and her contribution to Space Science. It was a great workshop, with a bit of roleplay and drama - which we in Antarctica love!
On Wednesday, we were at Thorp to take part in a Fitness Festival. It was a fab afternoon, with lots of fun games. We really enjoyed our afternoon, even though we were so tired after such a busy day!
On Thursday, we took part in our very own Dragon's Den. Over the week, we planned and designed a product or service (with an accompanying logo!) and on Thursday it was time to present them to everybody. Year 5 came together for an afternoon of presentations and they did not disappoint! Well done to everybody for having the confidence to get up and present (Miss McKean knows how nervous we were, and she was so proud that we all did it!)
Well done to our winning team, HYATT! which was made up of Lydia S, Sam, Fin, Rowan and Scarlett. A brilliant pitch and a great product idea!
On Friday we had the privilege of a visit from the team at Primary Enterprise World to deliver a National Life workshop. Over the course of the morning, we were introduced to 6 families - all with different financial positions and family build-ups. We planned a BBQ for them according to their budget, and learned about the different skills needed in different careers. It was lovely to hear our class have such a range of career aspirations from playing in the NBA to a future pilot! We discussed our responsibility to keep our planet healthy and made sure we knew of all of the ways in which we can be environmentally friendly.
In the afternoon, we became business owners. The bead shop opened and we had to buy beads, make bracelets, and sell them to our customers. With rising costs and demand being high, we had a busy afternoon! Well done to everybody for making a profit and for working as a team to overcome challenges.
Another busy week, only one left until a well deserved holiday!
We have had a very exciting week in Antarctica, with a trip on Thursday and lots of exciting lessons.
In computing, we have been making stop motion animation weather forecasts. Taking around 200 photos and adding a voice over to create our videos has been time consuming, but has been worth it for the final product! We can’t wait to see them when we finish them all.
On Wednesday, we did some more of our Chinese GuoHua art. This week, we focussed on painting dragonflies and sparrows. We did absolutely amazingly with this – Miss McKean was so impressed at our art skills and especially with our patience, determination and perseverance. We were even lucky enough to see some real Chinese art supplies, courtesy of Mr Saddington’s Mum, which were really interesting to finally see in real life. It is amazing to know how these artists make their own supplies (using an ink stone, water and an ink block to grind their own painting ink), we can really see where the Chi (life energy) and dedication to the artwork starts.
On Thursday, we headed to Durham to visit Durham University’s Oriental Museum. We were made honorary university students for the day!
We started the day with a handling workshop, where we were given some Shang items to look at and work out their purpose, material and what this told us about the Shang people. We were able to look at Oracle Bones (used for telling the future) and wine pans (the Shang people used boiling wine as a way to share a drink with their ancestors). We created some fantastic pictures and came to some amazing conclusions about these items using our archaeology skills.
Next, we were let loose in the Shang collection within the museum. We were set away on four different challenges, making sure we were looking at all of the artefacts and information around the room. It was great to see so many of the items that we have been learning about at school!
After a quick stop for lunch, it was time to learn more about Shang writing. We had already seen some of the writing on the Oracle Bones, but now it was time to write our own. The Shang people used Oracle Bones to ask questions to the Gods, so we had to come up with our own questions using their symbols. We had some fantastic questions, from ‘Will my field flood and destroy my crops?’ to ‘Will I get a wealthy husband or wife?’
For our final workshop of the day, we were told the story of how the Shang Dynasty came crashing down. With our trusty volunteers, we acted out the story. We noticed how similar the story was to ‘The Boy who Cried Wolf’ – which could be where the story originates from…
Overall, a fantastic day and a fantastic week! We certainly all need a rest this weekend after such a busy week.
Friday 10th March
We have had another busy week in Antarctica. With parents evenings, dance rehearsals, snowy play and West End Workshops - there's been barely any time to spare!
In science, we have continued learning about Life Cycles. We have been looking at how plants reproduce and what they need to do to disperse their seeds. It was interesting to find out where the fruit we eat comes from, and how the seeds can be spread by animals.
On Wednesday, we were lucky enough to take part in a workshop with Rebecca from West End in Schools, where we worked to use dance to bring a well known story to life. The Enormous Crocodile was animated through dance to tell the story without using any words - I think we can all agree that we did a fantastic job! A huge thanks to West End in Schools for the experience.
This half term we are learning about a style of Chinese art called GuoHua. This follows 5 key principles, and we were focussing on brushstrokes this week.
We started to use open and closed brush strokes (which allow us to contain energy or keep it inside of the painting) and used these to create images of bamboo. The classroom was so quiet, with only the relaxing music being heard. We got really enthusiastic about this art, and created some fab paintings!
We have had a brilliant first week back in Antarctica class! We started the week with our new topic in English, where we are learning all about newspaper reports. We have spent the week finding out what makes up a newspaper report, and key information that we need to include based on our toolkit.
Rehearsals for the dance festival are still underway, and from the sounds of it are going fantastically! We can't wait to see our dance troupe perform it for us.
In computing, we began to plan and create props for our own stop motion animation weather forecast. We have sunny skies, with a slight chance of syrup showers and pancake rain... sounds interesting! One group even had raining money, which we're sure we all wish was true!
Thursday was, of course, World Book Day! We had a fantastic day completing a project where, once again, we are becoming published authors - more information on this to come! We had some fab costumes, from Billionaire Boy, an inflatable cow, an inflatable bull rider and Mary Poppins to Miss Trunchbull, Harry Potter, Hermione Grainger, Rafe, and a handful of Cat in the Hat costumes - along with many more. I'm sure we can agree that we all looked fantastic, and we had a brilliant day thinking all about our favourite stories.
In science, we have started to look at Life Cycles, building on our knowledge from past years. This is such an interesting topic, which will help us to understand where everything from flowers to butterflies come from!
Another brilliant week, enjoy your weekend Antarctica class!
Another week comes to a close, but this time there has been an air of excitement as the half term holiday got closer!
In English, we have been learning all about poetry, and everybody in the class was very brave and got up and performed a poem. We were all amazing, and Miss McKean was so proud that everybody gave it a go. Congrats to Cain and Holly for being chosen as Writer of the Month for some beautiful poems - we certainly have some budding poets in Antarctica class!
In PSHE, we have talked about the importance of keeping ourselves safe online. We know a lot about how to make sure our personal information is kept personal, and how to report something that isn't right.
We continue to be brilliant swimmers, and all of us had a turn in the big pool this week - we have faced a lot of fears in our last week of half term!
In music, we have been learning about Chinese Pentatonic Scales, and this week we have composed our own melodies using Glockenspiels. This was such a fun lesson, and we came up with some amazing melodies that we practised, learned off by heart, and performed for the class.
Finally, we made some incredible photo frames in our woodwork topic in DT, which we have chosen to put a class photo inside of. This is a lovely way for all of us to remember our times in Antarctica Class 2022-2023.
We have had an amazing half term, and Miss McKean is so proud of all of us for the last 6 weeks. Have a lovely half term break, stay safe, and we will see you all again on the 27th of February! Enjoy a well earned rest!
What an exciting week we have had in Antarctica! In maths, we have started our area and scaling topic. We learned that the tip of our finger is approximately 1cm squared, and used this fact to estimate the areas of some rectangles around our classroom.
In science, we conducted our own exploding cannister experiments. This was an afternoon of laughter, big pops, and an awful lot of screaming! We had a lot of fun changing the variables to make sure we had a range of results - and repeated each test to make it fair.
In DT, we have started our woodwork. This meant using saws to cut wood that we had measured to make a magnetic note holder. We were all safe and responsible, and Miss McKean was very proud of our attitudes towards this task. We can't wait to give it another go next week and make another product!
We have done a lot of writing this week, with a final task of writing a story in English, focussing on characterisation, and a letter to King William asking to appoint us as the first Prince Bishop of Durham. We wrote some amazing persuasive letters, the King would struggle to choose just one!
We have had such a busy week in Antarctica! A huge congratulations to the eight children who competed in a mini basketball tournament at Thorp this week - we are so proud of Oscar, Oskar, Maddox, James, Ophelia, Millie, Kaysha and Sienna! Well done to the children who have started rehearsals for the Dance Festival this week, we are all so excited to see your performance come to life and cheer you on as loudly as we can!
In our English lessons, we did some roleplay to work on conversations between characters, developing body language and facial expression. This proved to be very entertaining and we had some amazing performances across the whole class.
In science, we all got a fright watching an explosive bottle experiment, and we are looking forward to conducting it ourselves next week - I am sure it will be an exciting lesson!
We have had another brilliant week in Antarctica. The class have done brilliantly with starting our maths focus on short division, and everyone has picked it up so fast. In English, we have been looking at 'Voices in the park' and noticing ways that we can use characterisation as authors. We have all been incredible engineers this week, and have had a go at building Truss Bridges using... spaghetti! Whilst not a practical resource, it has been a great way to try and build a structure and also work together as a team to create something. Well done to all of the children in Antarctica for another super week!
Antarctica have had an amazing first week back, settling into a routine and adapting to changes with brilliant attitudes. We have had a fun-filled week, with a WW1 themed workshop from Adam Bushnell and a National Writing Project - where we have written a chapter of a story and will have our work published. As always, Adam Bushnell's workshop was incredible, with real artefacts from WW1 and some replicas of items that the soldiers would have been given and carried around. A huge thank you to Adam for this workshop!
I have loved my first week as Antarctica's new class teacher, and I want to thank the staff, children and parents for welcoming me with open arms. I can't wait to see what else we get up to this year!
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Last Edited: 22nd April 2021
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