MrJennings

We have continued to enjoy our Arts Week.

On Wednesday we had a Year 5 and 6 art activities day in which we did four different art activities with four different teachers! Activities included:
- creating 3D graphics (by drawing the letters and then using the vanishing line to make them appear to be three dimensional);
- using pencil crayon to create a "What are they looking at?" picture (in which the foreground is made up of the backs and backs-of-heads of a crowd watching something);
- making a "tiger in the grass" picture using wax pastels and
- paintings in the style of Australian Aborigines (using a restricted palette of colours and sticks to create the images and symbols out of different sized dots).

On Thursday we had the "owl lady" visit us with a range of birds of prey including barn owls and eagle owls. We also had a visitor come to demonstrate the playing of African drums and to teach us how to play some of the traditional African rhythms. We also did some more work on Grandpa Chatterji. We watched the video of the story, discussed how it differed from the book and how the director had interpreted some of the incidents that we had studied. We also did a "hot seating" activity to further explore the characters, thoughts and feelings of the children in the book and then did another "thinking skill" activity comparing the characters of Grandpa Chatterji, Grandpa Leicester and Sanjay.

On Friday it was "bring your bear to school day" to raise money for a charity for sick children. In the morning we made a poster to encourage someone to care for Paddington Bear and then we had our Arts Week Quiz. In the afternoon a member of the British Paralympic Team visited our school to talk about his experiences and we finished our week by producing a water colour painting of a still life composition featuring flowers and music instruments.

Its Arts Week at school - a whole week of special activities.

On Monday we spent the morning planning a display (controlled by computer) to advertise the programme The Weakest Link and then began to test out some procedures to form part of the control program. In the afternoon we had cycling! Two coaches, one from British Cycling and the other from a local cycling club brought bicycles to our school field and we were taught six different cycling skills which we then practised before taking a timed test incorporating all the different skill. This is part of the Go-Ride scheme and soon we will be able to enter our scores on the Go-Ride web site.

Today it has been "Spanish Day" at school. It began with a flamenco dancer and guitarist performing for us and then we had a short maths lesson with a Spanish theme before making up some simple Spanish books which help us practise vocabulary to do with the body and days of the week. This afternoon we had our Spanish lesson (and our handwriting and PE sessions).

We have improved, completed and written up our work on Grandpa Chatterji - the episode about his funfair ride - and continued our maths work on data handling. We have thought about line graphs - drawing them and answering questions about them - and learned about the mode and arithmetic mean of a set of data.

We have spent quite a lot of time this week on history. This has involved us in thinking about the important factors which led the Saxon settlement of Nottingham develop from a village into a town. In art we used sketching and water colours to create pictures of slices of fruits. We also finished off our posters aiming to persuade people not to waste water.

We have been continuing our work based on the novel, Grandpa Chatterji, in English, concentrating on writing activities so far this week. We have been trying to write good quality passages to describe grandpa's visit to a funfair, including good description and showing the feelings of the characters.

In maths, our work has been about probability. We have been using the correct vocabulary to describe the probability of an event and placing different events on a probability line.

We have done some more work in ICT - this time beginning to write a program to control a pelican crossing and we have also had our PE session with the YMCA coaches and our handwriting and Spanish lessons.

We have finished off our English and maths tests now and will have a more "normal" week next week.

In the last two days we have also done some more work on our Earth in Space topic - thinking about how the Earth and moon move in relation to the sun and each other. We learned about this by making our own model of the movements (using ourselves as astronomical bodies!), by looking at the BBC Science Clips site and by making notes on a diagram. We also did more of our current art project - using our sketchbooks to sketch and develop still-life sketches.

We have been doing some tests this week, in English and maths. These are the QCA optional End of Year tests for Year 5! So far we have done a reading test, a written maths test (which is done without a calculator), a mental maths test, a spelling test and a short writing test.

We have still done some maths and English work, mostly reviewing things that we have already learned this year. We have also done some history, thinking about what our area looked like before the Saxons came and then how it changed when they made their settlement.

We have done some more of our writing about Grandpa Chatterji, concentrating on organising our ideas into good paragraphs and creating interesting sentences. We also wrote a letter explaining why, even though water is a common natural resources, we have to pay to receive our water. In maths we have been thinking about percentages and making sure that we know decimal and percentage equivalents of common fractions (including half, quarters, thirds and tenths).

We did PE and had our spelling and tables tests and in science we learned about how the movement of the Earth in relation to the sun creates day and night. We did some more sketching in art this week, working on some still-life pictures.

We have moved on to consider fractions and decimals in maths. We have been learning how to calculate fractions of numbers (such as three quarters of thirty-two) and have been changing fractions into equivalent decimals using a calculator.

Our work on Rivers and Water has continued with thinking about how the water companies clean the water before they pipe it to our homes. First we thought about all the things that might be in the water before the water companies get it and then tried to clean some dirty water ourselves. We managed to get all the "bits" out with sieves and filter paper but anything that was dissolved in the water was not removed. Then we used the booklet The Watermen to find out about all the different processes that the water companies use to clean the water.

In English we have looked at a story by Jan Mark and used this to think about ways of answering comprehension questions and today we thought more about Grandpa Chatterji. We planned a piece of writing about the character of Grandpa Chatterji today, thinking about his appearance, his personality and where he comes from. We discussed the organisation of our writing and prepared one of the paragraphs.

On Tuesday we had our PE lesson with the YMCA and our handwriting and Spanish sessions.