It has been a busy week in Y5. 

On Friday, it was Red Nose Day and we were raising money for Comic Relief. Some children raised money by challenging themselves to a sponsored silence or even tying their legs together all day! We also had a cake sale, a joke competition and could buy red noses all week. We are looking forward to finding out how much we have raised.

In Mandarin this week, Y5NL were learning about the Dragon Boat Festival.

We made origami boats and leant about Qu Yuan and what happened in his life. We also found information about the Luna calendar, plus we learnt that the date of the dragon boat festival is the fifth day of the fifth month. They have dragon boat race competitions all over China and also the world. One of the largest boats is used by women.

In different parts of China, they celebrate in different ways. In Bejing, the children dyed eggs and used them as amulets; in another part of China they made a 60 foot rice dumpling and it was a Guiness world record. Also, they got into boats and dropped rice parcels, so that the fish would not harm Qu Yuan's body, and used red wine to keep the dragon spirits away.

Now we are going to tell you about Qu Yuan's life. It all started when Qu Yuan was the king's advisor and the king's kingdom stretched out from Spain to China. The king really liked Qu Yuan. All of the other advisors to the king got realy jealous so they started telling lies about Qu Yuan. Eventually, the king started to believe the lies and betrayed him. Qu Yuan was trying to tell the king that they would be under attack if they didn't do anything but the king did not listen. So, later their country got attacked and suddenly Qu Yuan felt really sad so he drowned himself and that's how the dragon festival started.

By Rhys and Jacob.

On Monday this week, Y5WR had a great time in the forest as part of our class treat. The children have been working so hard over the last few weeks that we felt they deserved a treat. Their challenge was to work as a team to build the tallest, sturdiest structure out of materials that they found in the woods. This structure had to hold a creme egg on the top for a minimum of 10 seceonds. The winning structure was over 1.90m and successfully held the egg for the required time. 

Well done Y5WR

Y5NC have finished writing our own endings for the Highwayman poem. It was tricky trying to make sure that the rhythm, rhymes and repetition were all the same as in the original but we are really proud of our poems. Here are a few and all of them will be going up in the classroom for people to read when they visit us.