Welcome from the Head of Year

Year 5 is an exciting time filled with many opportunities and new experiences and it is where your child’s Valley Garden’s journey begins. Our main aim in Year 5 is to ensure that the transition from first school is a smooth one and that all pupils settle quickly and happily into middle school life. The safeguarding, welfare and wellbeing of our pupils is essential to their success and academic achievement and as a team we build strong partnerships with feeder schools so we know key information about our new pupils before they arrive in September. Strong home-school communication is also integral to this and we have a ‘Welcome Evening’ in July to meet form teachers and visit your child’s classroom.

Pupils are introduced to new subjects and encouraged to become more resilient and independent. During the first couple of weeks, they are taught in form groups for all subjects, but are then put into smaller groups for English, Maths and Design Technology. They access specialist facilities: conducting experiments in the Science Labs; composing and playing instruments in the Music Room; designing, crafting and inventing in the Design Technology workshop and Food Technology rooms and trying out lots of new sports in Physical Education.

PSHE (Personal, social, health and economic education) is taught discreetly but also  embedded across the whole curriculum and through our weekly ‘Thought and Action’ which highlights a wide variety of themes and focuses on diversity, inclusion and good mental health.

Our core values: kindness, resilience and respect permeate throughout every aspect of our school and it is our hope that these words, and more importantly their meaning, are reflected in our culture and pupils’ attitudes to themselves, others and the challenges they face. As well as these values, we are also developing skills of metacognition (the processes involved when learners plan, monitor, evaluate and make changes to their own learning behaviours), which allows pupils to understand how they learn and have a toolkit of strategies when approaching a challenge. High aspirations for their learning and development is paramount for developing independence and our Code of Conduct ensures that learning behaviours are strengthened.

Head of Year: Miss H McElderry

Deputy Head of Year: Mrs A Goel

SLT Link: Mr P Baggett

Highlights:

We encourage all pupils in Year 5 to participate in extracurricular activities and clubs – with a huge selection on offer, there really is something for everyone! 

Trips & Events:

• High Borrans Residential
• Whitby/York Residential
• Ford Castle Residential
• Film Festival Cinema Trip
• Christmas Production
• Author visits
• Celebration assemblies
• Themed drop-down days
• One off celebration days supporting local and national charities