MrJennings

In the last two days before half term, we did some work on probability in maths and everyone wrote a short "myth", using ideas about ancient Greek gods and mythology to create a story explaining the occurrence of a natural phenomenon.

We tried a new team game in PE and, on Friday afternoon, we actually began our weaving in earnest.

Next week is half term. Have a good holiday.

We looked at an ancient Greek myth in English today - the story of Pandora's Box. After we had thought about the story itself, we looked at how it had been written and then tried re-writing some of the sentences.

In maths we spent some more time on graphs - it really is the last day on this for the moment. We discussed ideas about probability at the end of the lesson and move onto this area properly tomorrow.

In science we learned about the processes of pollination and fertilisation and the role of different parts of the flower in seed production.

To finish the day we watched and discussed a video about the Lake District which showed aspects of forestry, tourism and farming in the National Park.

We had a visitor come to school today to speak about healthy eating and then we completed our work on bar graphs by thinking about plotting data on graphs with different scales.

This afternoon we had PE with the YMCA and then did some handwriting practice before having our Spanish lesson.

We began our maths unit on data handling by revising some work on bar graphs. We completed our ICT work on graphic design and, in English, created some more concrete poems. We looked at a poems which just used "sound" words. We thought about the specific meaning of these and then wrote our own poems in a similar style.

(We also spent a little bit of time getting ready for parents' evening today.)

We spent some more time thinking about legends and, today created a villain for a legend that we could write. While we were doing this we thought especially about different ways that we could start sentences to help make our writing interested for someone to read. These were the ones we used:
proper name; pronoun; possessive pronoun; verb (with an ~ing suffix); adverb; connective
Lots of the descriptions were excellent.

We did some maths, including our tables test, ICT (designing a classroom layout on a measured grid) and some of us began to thread up our weaving frames.

We did our maths review today and then did some PE to recover! Most people didn't seem to find it too hard though.

This afternoon we did some more work on legends - this time we looked at the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece. We wrote up our science experiment results, did our spelling test and finished off some RE. (A busy afternoon!)

We started our work on legends in earnest today, looking at part of a story about Perseus. We thought about aspects of Perseus' "heroic" character and the involvement of the gods in the story.

We have our half-termly maths review test tomorrow, so we spent some time in our maths groups checking some of the work that we have covered since the beginning of the year.

This afternoon we spent most of our time on our Lake District topic, thinking about forestry in the area - how the forests affect what people do and how people affect and use forests. We also looked at the results of our science experiment investigating the conditions needed for germination. We took some photographs and discussed the outcome of the experiment ready to write this up tomorrow.

In maths, we revised place value in decimals and had our last session, for the time being, trying to put a set of mixed decimal numbers in order. We heard from our school council representatives about the discussions at their recent meeting and then Mrs. Harrison took us for our Reading Test. This afternoon we had PE (with YMCA), handwriting and Spanish.

In maths we worked on understanding decimal numbers and looked at putting decimal numbers in order. We completed our technology work making weaving frames and reflected on aspects of the work we had found easier and harder and the types of information that helped us the most with this task.

We did some literacy and road safety work and, at the end of the day did some CPSHE work with Mrs. Hall.

The highlight of the day was the start of our combined Design Technology and Art project. In this project we are working towards creating images using textiles. One of the ways we will be doing this is by weaving. This is where we have the overlap with technology and today we began making our weaving frames. This involved a lot of careful measuring, cutting and sawing.

Many of our Year 6 children went off to Kingswood for their activity weekend and some of those who were staying at school were able to help us with some of this work.

We looked at decimals in mathematics, concentrating on understanding place value in decimal numbers. We had our weekly spelling test and did "bench ball" in PE.

This afternoon we worked on spelling patterns in adverbs (to help get ready for this week's spelling lists) and then did some more work on aspects of Islam.

The school web site host is down and has been down for five days now.

It has not been possible to contact Edex/SchoolSite and so we have uploaded our site to a new location. The URL is:http://westdalejuniors.co.uk/ .

I apologise for any incovenience this causes, but it is due to factors beyond our control.

It was our harvest festival service today and everything went really well. All the years presented something interesting and the singing was great.

We spent most of the rest of the time today writing poems, listening to poems, improving our poems, designing a way to present them and preparing them for a display.

We did some poetry in English today. Our poems were built up using single lines of speech - each line being from a new speaker and the task was to make the speech verbs match the character speaking really well.

We had a whole-school run-through of our harvest service for tomorrow and, in the afternoon, we had PE, our weekly Spanish lesson and our handwriting practice time.

We completed some work on converting between mixed numbers and improper fractions in maths and, in English, looked at punctuation of direct speech (including writing the reporting clause in different places in the sentence).

In science we set up an experiment to find out the conditions that runner beans need to germinate and we will be monitoring these over the coming couple of weeks.

We practised our harvest service presentation, did some ICT (using a graphics program to design the layout of a classroom) and did some PSHE/Citizenship work with Mrs. Hall.