MrJennings

We have been working hard to finish off our weaving and to make our Christmas cards and calendars. These were all done in time - just!

We all had a good time at our Christmas party on Tuesday afternoon and then lots of us went to visit St. Andrew's House to sing carols to and with the old people who live there.

Today, the last day of term we had our school carol service. Lots of parents and grandparents came to join us and then everyone (well, everyone who had already finished their weaving) watched a video.

Happy Christmas to everyone.

This week we have been very involved in our Christmas Concert presentations. We gave four performances of the pantomime, Cinderella - two in the afternoons and two evening performances. It all went very well indeed.

In English, we have been continuing our work on recounts, writing pieces reporting fictional stories as well as recounts of recent events and activities at school (including our pantomime). We have done some place value work in maths and written reports of some of our science experiments.

We had an art day in which we produced our "talking textile" piece. We used a range of media to produce a large-scale piece of artwork on cloth which told the story of Theseus and the Minotaur (fitting in with our history work on ancient Greece). These were group efforts, involving children working together in teams of five or six to design and make the piece. The outcomes were very pleasing.

We have also continued with our weaving and some of the class have already finished their first picture panel very satisfactorily. We will be making these into cards or calendars next week.

We did our "End of Term" maths test on Thursday and have also spent some time in English working on the creation of good introductory paragraphs for newspaper reports (recount writing). We have been trying to make sure that we tell the reader who, what, where, when (and, if possible) why.

In science we planned an experiment to find out how long it takes for your pulse rate to return to its resting rate after exercise and carried out this investigation, making sure that the tests were fair.

We finished the week by having a final rehearsal for our Christmas pantomime which we are presenting on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday next week.

We had a special simulation game in the computer room yesterday morning in which the class had to work in groups to read police reports coming on a news-feed and direct police officers to undertake different tasks or seek to discover answers to questions needed to complete the investigation. This was great fun, involved a lot of careful reading, collaborative working and use of speaking and listening skills.

In maths we spent some time recapping work we have covered this half term ready for our review tomorrow. We had our weekly YMCA session of PE and our Spanish lesson and we completed our plans for the bodkins we are making in our weaving topic. After creating a series of possible designs, we chose our favourite, developed this design and made three copies of the bodkins to use on our weaving.

In maths we looked at factors today, working out the factors of all the multiples of ten up to one hundred and also thinking about the numbers of factors (odd or even number) and the number of factors of square numbers.

We have begun a new unit of work in English in which we are thinking about recounts (news reports, sports reports, journals, etc.). Today we examined a newspaper-style report and annotated the features we identified.

We also had a discussion in preparation for a school council meeting and a full rehearsal for our school Christmas Concert.

In English, we spent some time editing (correcting and improving) our play scripts which we bagan last week while our work in maths moved on to thinking about square numbers.

In science we did an investigation of the effects of exercise on pulse rates, drawing graphs to show the results and we also spent some time editing our powerpoint presentations about plants for our previous science topic.

We completed a section of our work in RE and enjoyed another swimming session.

We have been working on number patterns and sequences in maths, continuing sequences of numbers and explaining the pattern. We have extended this to include writing algebraic statements to describe the sequences.

In English we have done some comprehension and grammar work and we have spent some time using the computers to make Powerpoint presentations illustrating the main functions of different parts of a plant in science.

To continue our Design Technology project on weaving, we have been looking at and thinking about the features of bodkins. We have also started to design the bodkins which we will need to make in order to have sufficient to complete our woven panels.