In Maple class, we are Topcliffe’s Year 5 and 6 learners! Our teacher this year is Miss Howard, with Mrs Weightman and Mrs Metcalfe.

We have some extra special responsibilities in Year 5/6. We get to help keeping our younger learners happy and safe as buddies, as well as enjoying being ‘spiritual leaders’ where we get to take over collective worships on a Thursday, bringing Bible stories to life and exploring how they link to our core Christian values.

We approach our learning through a variety of interesting topics – we have really thrown ourselves into this already, starting with World War Two this year! We focus on embedding our new-found knowledge through a range of different writing opportunities and regular knowledge quizzes to keep us on our toes! We really enjoy using a range of high quality texts to gain even more in-depth insight into our topics. We spend a lot of time learning new vocabulary and practise features of grammar, before creating our own writing based on what we have learnt. We love to publish our work and share it with everyone. Every half term we also have an RE week, where we immerse ourselves in an RE topic and do all of our learning for that week through it! This is so useful in helping us to gain more depth and understanding of Christianity, as well as other religions, which helps us to appreciate the similarities and differences between them.

In Maths, we enjoy using differentiated chilli challenges to ensure that we practise the different maths skills, as well as always having a go at reasoning and problem solving questions. We are able to choose the level of challenge we would like, depending on the task – we do love to challenge ourselves and try our hardest! Year 5’s have a daily CLIC Maths session, with Year 6’s taking up the Ninjas challenge – here, we get to practise the full range of maths skills in order to keep them sharp throughout the year, then our main lessons are more focused on individual areas of maths. Our times tables are also kept strong with an in-class challenge every Friday after practising on TimesTables Rockstars!

In the afternoons, we focus on our wider curriculum subjects. Miss Howard loves to get us all speaking French, and we let our creative juices flow through Art and Music lessons. We make regular time for PSHCE lessons alongside philosophy (P4C), as we explore our emotions, discuss bigger concepts and start to learn more about each other and the world around us. We are lucky enough to also have a PE specialist working with us, and Miss Howard boosts our fitness with weekly circuits sessions too – we are a busy bunch!!.

Then, when all is said and done, we end the day catching up with Newsround and discussing the events happening in the world, before enjoying a few chapters of a class novel that we love to just sit back, listen to and enjoy!

We know that we are lucky to be enjoying all of these learning opportunities and are constantly striving to be the best that we can be!

Please click here for a copy of our welcome letter.