MrJennings

We had our DARE graduation on Monday.

This was a super occasion with the Mayor of Gedling as well as lots of parents and relatives present. We gave a presentation about the DARE course we have been following. This included role-plays and reading some of our DARE reports which described what we had learned and the effect this has had on us. There were two songs, One more step and our schools own DARE song called DARE to say NO! and everyone received their graduation certificates from our DARE teacher and the mayor.

Also on Monday we watched the Year 3 and 4 concert which was very enjoyable.

On Monday and Tuesday we did some maths, focusing on harder written subtraction problems and we spent most of the rest of Tuesday preparing for our TIMETRAVELLING pilgrimage to Southwell Minster which we went on today.

We spent the whole day at Southwell. We travelled by bus, arriving at about 9.50 am, and after processing into the minster will classes from many other schools, we joined in a short welcome service before participating in lots of different activities (four before and three after lunch). The varied activities helped us learn more about the minster, the things that happen there day by day and the pilgrimages that people have made to the minster over the last 900 years.

We have spent a lot of time on our RE topic this week. The work is about places of worship and pilgrimage. Following our work on Mosques, we thought about Christian churches. We had a visit to St. James' Parish Church where we looked at the church furniture and different parts of the church and heard about baptism and Holy Communion. Back at school we used photographs that had been taken at the church to make our own powerpoint presentations to show some of the things we had seen and learned about. We have also been learning about the Hajj - a pilgrimage that Muslim people look forward to making at least once in their lives if they can. We looked at a virtual tour of the Hajj on the internet to find our some of the things that people do on the Hajj and the significance of them.

We also did some more work on our mental addition and subtraction and practiced our DARE presentation once again.

11th March was an INSET day.

In maths we have been thinking about different strategies which may help when doing mental arithmetic.

We had our final DARE lesson. This took the form of a quiz which showed that the work had been remembered very well. We have also been getting ready for our DARE graduation ceremony which takes place next week. For this we have been preparing some short dramas to show different ways to resist peer pressure.

In science we looked back at the work we have been doing on Sound and then did a review activity.

We have had our PE session with YMCA and also had our Spanish and handwriting lessons.

The bad weather and the effect on the roads around school caused us to be closed on Wednesday but "normal service" returned yesterday. We completed our work on data handling and graphs, spending time thinking about the importance of making sure that the axes are correctly labelled and marked in even steps. We completed a writing activity writing the text for an encyclopedia entry about houses. In RE we were thinking about mosques and used a virtual tour of a mosque on the internet to help us label a picture or a mosque and understand the significance of different features. We had our tables and spelling test and the looked at the BBC science clips website to conclude our main work on Sound.

Today our maths was reminding us of some strategies we can use for doing addition and subtraction sums in our head and then most of the day focused on ancient Greek work. As well as spending some time thinking our the life-style of slaves in ancient Greece as part of our history topic, our English work was about the alphabet and words which have come into our language from ancient Greece.

In maths we thought more about graphs - why they are useful and when they should be used. Then we did a maths experiment and tallied the data before producing a graph to help us answer some questions.

In English we have been doing some non-fiction writing, trying to make sure that the sentences are interesting. We are doing this by using good vocabulary and using a range of ways (parts of speech) to start the sentences so they have a varied structure.

This afternoon we had our PE session with the YMCA, Spanish and handwriting in which we created a poster for our school Easter Egg competition.