Dear Parents,

Welcome to the Year 5 help page. Your child has now entered the upper juniors. This is an exciting time in their primary career as they build on the strong foundations they have gained throughout school. As you can see from the Curriculum Overview there is a lot to learn!

READING

Key to everything is reading. Reading remains the priority in class and for home learning - diving into more and more challenging novels is our goal.

PURPLE MASH

This digital platform is a key tool for teachers and children. It has become a valuable tool to support online learning in class and at home. Here are some short films to support your understanding of how it works and supports learning. Click on the image to open the film.

MATHS

Maths can be tricky to support at home. Sometimes it seems that we teach in a different way. This is true in a sense that in class we use mastery strategies. Key to this approach is the “small steps” approach. These are steps that break the learning down further, steps that also use practical apparatus. Maths is full of process (where all the mathematical thinking is) and this is crucial in all our maths lessons. We can sometimes become too focused on the outcome - sums that are right. Here I have placed a sequence of key skills/strategies and mathematical facts the children will encounter and which you can help them with at home once they have met them in school.

First - table facts (multiplication and division). We use the digital platform TTROCKSTARS to support the learning of tables. This is an intuitive platform that responses to the learner. Here is the link to the log on page and a film to explain.

Purple Mash

Purple Mash is a cloud-based platform for primary-aged children. It contains a wide range of age-appropriate, creative software tools for writing, drawing, coding, animating, blogging and much more. In addition to these programs, the platform provides resources and themed lesson activities, which can be set for pupils to do at home. Feedback on their work can then be provided to the pupil, including recorded audio feedback, and all the work is stored online, within Purple Mash.

We have used Purple Mash throughout the year and the children are now starting to create an online portfolio of work that as parents, you can see at home. The video below explains how to access the Parent Portal for your child so that you can see what tasks they have been set and the feedback that they have received.