Year 5

Week beginning 15th December 2025

Our project for this half-term is Space and Earth.

Firstly, a huge thank you to all of the Year 5 parents and children for their generous gifts and cards. We have had a wonderful, festive final week, enjoying the beautiful Candlelight Service, watching Christmas nativity performances and taking part in lots of Christmas-themed learning.

We wish you all a lovely and restful Christmas break and look forward to seeing all the children again after the holidays.

Merry Christmas!

Important dates and messages:

Key Dates

The calendar section on the website lists all major events throughout the academic year, but here are some reminders:

Thursday 11th June 2026 – School’s 170th Birthday
Friday 19th June 2026 – Sports Day at King’s Park Stadium
Saturday 27th June – St James’ Summer Fayre

Worship theme:

Hope – Epiphany (6th January)

Matthew 2:1–2
After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem and asked,
“Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.”

Curriculum

English:

This week, the children will begin their new project with some cold writing tasks to gauge their writing strengths and areas for development. We will then move on to our new unit of space-themed writing.

Maths:

We will continue and complete our learning on fractions, focusing on adding and subtracting mixed numbers. We will finish the week with a fractions assessment.

DT / Computing:
The children will move on to the Coding unit on Purple Mash.

RE:

We will begin our new topic by learning about Buddhism and exploring the key question: Who is Siddhartha Gautama?

Geography:

In geography, we will begin learning about time zones around the world and how different countries are located within these time zones.

Other news:

PPA Days - PPA Days will be every other Tuesday, and children should come in wearing PE kits.
PE every Thursday - Children should wear their PE kits every Tuesday.

Homework:

Please find links to the relevant information below for the Project Overview and Homework.
MyMaths - We will set up MyMaths tasks termly, based on the learning we will be doing this term. Please let us know if you are finding them too easy or tricky, and remember that below, there are many resources you can use to extend your learning from home. Various MyMaths activities have been set for this term. This is to allow children who like to do more to be able to. However, children do not have to complete all the MyMaths activities. One per week is our minimum recommendation.
Reading books - we would like to remind everyone to have a reading book in school - this can be a school or home book. We want all children to be able to share recommendations and reviews of what we have read recently. We display books we've read in the classroom to get children talking about the stories they love and inspire others to try new titles.
Reading records - All children should now have a grey reading record in which they can record how often they are reading. They will receive one raffle ticket if they read three times a week and two if they read more than five. At the end of each term, we will draw a raffle to win a trip to Costa. You have to be in it to win it! Activities in the reading records can be completed at home for fun!

Reading:

This term, we are reading The Jamie Drake Equation. We will be using Designated Reader sentence stems to support our written answers. Each lesson focuses on a different reading skill, including inferring, predicting, questioning, evaluating, clarifying, summarising and making connections.

Spellings:

Our spellings for this term are below. However, we are moving away from weekly tests, using more discreet learning techniques, and applying our spelling words across our curriculum.

Week 1	Week 2	Week 3	Week 4	Week 5
debt	autumn	island	Knowledge	align
doubt	column	isle	Known	assign
lamb	hymn	debris	Knife	design
subtle	solemn	aisle	Knight	reign
climb	condemn	viscount	Knocked	resign
climb	condemn	viscount	Knocked	gnaw
Silent b	Silent n	Silent s	Silent k K is usually silent when it precedes ‘n’.	Silent g

Best wishes,

Year 5 Team

Miss Martin and Miss Perry

Learning as a family in Jesus, through Love, Hope, and Forgiveness.

Matthew 19:26: “With God all things are possible.”