Year 5

Welcome To Year 5!

This term our WoW Topic is 'War - Our Changing World'.

Our key text for the first half term is 'Northern Lights' by Phillip Pullman.

Published by Scholastic between 1995 and 2000, the His Dark Materials trilogy is widely regarded as a modern classic and is probably the series Waterstones’ booksellers most frequently cite as their favourite.

Its heroine, Lyra Belacqua, frequently tops polls as an all-time favourite character, appearing in the Top 10 Favourite Heroes on World Book Day 2016. The New Statesman wrote of the trilogy: “Once in a lifetime a children’s author emerges who is so extraordinary that the imagination of generations is altered… The most ambitious work since The Lord of the Rings, [His Dark Materials] is as intellectually thrilling as it is magnificently written.”

It begins with a girl and her daemon. The girl is Lyra Belacqua, an orphan who lives in a place like, and yet unlike, Oxford in a parallel universe in which science, theology and magic are entwined. Yet for Lyra, her world is about climbing the rooftops of the Oxford colleges with her friend Roger, enthralling the neighbourhood children with her tales and keeping out of the way of the scholars of Jordan College.

Then children start to go missing, snatched mysteriously by a group the children call ‘The Gobblers’. When Roger is taken, Lyra founds herself bound up in a dangerous chase, a daring game of cat-and-mouse that sees her on the run from the highest authorities.

It is a hunt that will take her far from Oxford, to high-society London and the home of the mysterious and beautiful Mrs Coulter and beyond, to the home of the witches and the kingdom of the ice bears where the aurora awaits.

Here Lyra’s quest for answers becomes a mission to understand a mysterious phenomenon called Dust and there are secrets too, about her own family, about a prophecy, about betrayal and about the universe; secrets that come at a deadly cost.