Ark Victoria Academy

Dear Year 5 parents/carers,

I am so excited to be Head of Year 5 this year. We have a wonderful and dedicated team of teachers who are committed to ensuring the academic and personal development of all the children we teach. We have been very encouraged with the way pupils have settled into year 5 and are showing our Ark values every day, being ambitious, resilient and kind.

Naturally, much of our focus will be on preparing the children for their final year of primary school and ensuring they have the key literacy and numeracy skills required to be successful.  Reading continues to be a focus for us: increasing vocabulary, improving reading fluency and encouraging a love of reading for pleasure will, as always, be a priority for our students.  As such, we appreciate any support you can provide at home.   Listening to your child read aloud as often as possible and talking to them about what they’re reading will be of great benefit in ensuring we build a positive reading culture among our students. Please also ask your child for their bookmark, and tick or initial to show they have read at home.
In mathematics this year, we will be building on the children’s prior learning with extremely important units on, for example, fractions, decimals and percentages amongst others.  We will be ensuring children are secure in their learning and ready for Year 6.  We would of course appreciate your support in helping your children with any home learning to help us with this goal of embedding these vital math skills. 

Along with our focus on literacy and numeracy, we will also be enjoying a rich and varied wider curriculum this year.   Science lessons are always a source of inspiration and wonder for our students and they will certainly be fascinated with this year’s topics such as ‘Space’, and in the experiments we have planned around ‘Forces’ and the ‘Properties of Materials’.   In Humanities, we will be investigating historical biases around gender and race and in geography, studying both human and physical aspects with units on different forms of governance and around rivers and mountains.  It is always a pleasure to see just how curious our children are about the wider world and to discuss the range of questions they have!

Personal development is a big focus for us as an academy this year. At Ark Victoria we want to help our pupils become curious citizens with a strong moral purpose. As well as embedded themes throughout our curriculum offer, children will study carefully sequenced lessons and have weekly assemblies to develop a diverse knowledge of moral, social, and cultural issues as well as how they can positively contribute to the wider community. We are especially looking forward to learning about character and virtues.
We also have a jam-packed year of enrichment activities planned to support students’ learning and provide them with days that they will never forget! Visiting Birmingham’s Thinktank Science Museum, a canoeing trip right here in Small Heath, and a trip to the theater, are amongst some of the exciting opportunities to look forward to. 

I speak on behalf of the Year 5 team in saying that we are all extremely excited for the journey we will take with our students this year.   We are privileged to be able to help them learn, grow and prosper together and we will be dedicated to ensuring they make the fullest progress both socially and academically in this penultimate year of their primary school experience. 

Mrs Qamran (Head of Year 5) 

Please use the following image to see our Year 5 Students and their work: