Maple Class
In Maple class, we are Topcliffe’s Year 5 and 6 learners! Our teacher this year is Miss Howard, with the support of Mrs Parsons and Miss Knott.
We have some extra special responsibilities in Year 5/6 that help to build us as good citizens. 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 weekly collective worships, bringing Bible stories to life and exploring how they link to our core Christian values.
We approach our learning through a variety of interesting curriculum units – we have really thrown ourselves into this already, starting with 'The Mysteries of The Ancient Maya' 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 practising 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 unit 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 choosing our 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! Every morning we have a dedicated 'Maths Blast' session – 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.
In the afternoons, we get to 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, to help to develop our skills and keep us in top shape, as well as having dedicated time to enjoy forest school sessions, led by our specialist, Mr Walkington.
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 are so lucky to be enjoying all of these learning opportunities and are constantly striving to be the best that we can be!
Click here for a copy of Maple Class Welcome Letter.
