This week we have been mathematicians, artists, scientists and 18th century convicts!

We are making great progress in our topic of ‘Amazing Australia’.  We have continued to look at Aboriginal art, and this week the focus was on rarrk art – which is sometimes called ‘x-ray’ art.  We used techniques such as cross-hatch to complete our art, and made sure we continued to use ‘earthy’ colours (such as browns and oranges) as these are the colours made and used by traditional Aboriginal artists.  We have been learning all about the First Fleet – a fleet of 11 ships which set sail for Australia from England in May, 1787.  On board were prisoners bound for the penal colony of Australia – the convicts even included children!  We found out that Britain had very harsh laws at that time, for quite petty crimes, so the prisons were very full.  One solution was to ship people to Australia so that they could help build colonies there.  We looked at two case studies – a 14 year old boy who was sentences to 14 years for stealing 17 1/2p and a gardener who was sentenced to 7 years for stealing onions.  We will be researching more convicts next week.  We learned that the journey was tough and took a very long 8 months.  We were shocked that even the children had to do hard work such as quarrying rock and washing laundry by hand, and even more shocked that they could receive lashes with the cat o’ nine tails or even be hanged!  We are very lucky that children nowadays are able to know their rights and have people who help protect their rights.  We wrote diary entries as if we were convicts on the ship, and our focus was descriptive vocabulary.

In maths, we have done some addition and also some times tables.  We made fortune tellers to help us practise our times tables – we found this quite tricky with all the folding!  Did any of the parents/carers make fortune tellers when they were young?  We have made super progress with our addition and are beginning to present our work more neatly in our jotters too (which is making Miss Thomson slightly less grumpy!)  We will be doing a wee assessment on this next week, before moving on to subtraction.

On Monday, we really enjoyed a visit from Emma, who is a veterinary nurse with the PDSA.  We learned all about the important job the PDSA do.  We asked some really sensible questions and shared some interesting information.  Well done, P5!

Next week, we have a drama workshop to look forward to!  We will also be (technology willing!) starting to make some short stop-motion animations – we hope to share these with you in our assembly after the holidays.  Another busy week to get ready for, so have a lovely relaxing weekend!