Welcome to Year 5 – Hawthorne

 

Miss Mason

 

Learning Update

Literacy

We have started reading The Tempest by William Shakespeare. The play tells the story of Prospero, a powerful magician who lives on a mysterious island with his daughter Miranda, and how he uses his magic to bring a shipwrecked group of people to the island to seek justice and forgiveness. We have been taking on the roles of different characters and reading the play aloud to bring the story to life. We have also been writing in the present perfect tense, creating our own dialogues between characters, and writing detailed character descriptions to explore their personalities and motivations. It has been exciting to step into Shakespeare’s world and experience the drama of The Tempest!

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Maths

We have been focusing on multiplication and division. We have been learning to multiply and divide numbers up to four digits using formal written methods, including long multiplication and short division. We have also been practising multiplying and dividing by 10, 100, and 1,000, and using our knowledge of factors, multiples, squares, and cubes to solve more complex problems. In addition, we have applied our skills to real-life word problems and explored how multiplication and division are linked through inverse operations. This work has helped us to build confidence, accuracy, and fluency in our calculations. We have also started our topic all about Fractions, looking at how to make equivalent fractions to unit fractions.

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Art

We have recently finished our topic on Colourful Landscapes by producing our final landscape sketches. During this project, we explored how to create different tints, tones, and shades using a range of colours and techniques to bring our artwork to life. We experimented with blending and layering to show depth and mood in our landscapes.

Now, we have started a new art project all about Taotie — a traditional Chinese mask design often found on ancient bronze vessels, known for its symmetrical patterns and mysterious animal-like features. This project links perfectly with our history topic on the Dynamic Dynasties, as Taotie designs were an important part of Shang art and culture. We explored the key features of these intricate designs before creating our own detailed line drawings of Taotie, inspired by the artwork of this ancient civilisation.

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Science

We have been learning about levers, pulleys, and gears, exploring how these mechanisms help make work easier. We discovered that levers use a pivot point, called a fulcrum, to lift or move loads, and that the closer the load is to the fulcrum, the less effort is needed. We found that pulleys use wheels and ropes to lift heavy objects, and that using more pulleys in a system can reduce the effort required. We also learned that gears are toothed wheels that interlock to change the direction, speed, or force of movement. Using our maths skills, we calculated how much effort was needed on each apparatus to move an object and explored how this changed depending on the number of pulleys used or the distance from the fulcrum on a lever.

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Guided Reading

We have started exploring a non-fiction text all about the Moon. We have been using a range of important Year 5 reading comprehension skills, such as retrieving key facts, making inferences, summarising main ideas, explaining the meaning of new vocabulary in context, and identifying the author’s purpose and use of language. Throughout each session, we have been interpreting and answering questions that help us understand the text in greater depth. At the end of the text, we complete a full set of comprehension questions that link to all these different skills, helping us to develop our confidence and accuracy when reading and analysing non-fiction texts.

In the following weeks we will be learning: 

• Literacy- planning and writing our own stories based on The Tempest

• Maths- Fractions (converting improper fractions and ordering)

• Science- pulley investigation

• Art- Using different materials to create moulds and patterns 

• History- Comparing life during and after the Shang Dynasty 

Autumn Term 2025

Click on the links below to see what the children in Year 5 will be learning in the Autumn Term.