MrJennings

We had a special activity today when everyone in the class went to visit our infant school to form our Buddy Groups. (We make Buddy Groups at Westdale so that the children who join our school in September will already know some children and know that they have someone in addition to the teachers and dinner ladies who they can talk to and who will help them.)

In groups of two or three we joined up with groups of two or three infants. We took photographs and then helped our infant "buddies" to plan some writing about themselves. We are looking forward to the return visit when the infants come to our school next week. Then we will help them to write up their work on a sheet together with their photographs.

This afternoon we concentrated on history, thinking about the changes that happened in Nottingham soon after the Norman Conquest.

Yesterday, in addition to our PE session with the YMCA, we had Spanish and handwriting. In maths we revised some work on decimals and long multiplication and in English we planned a poster to persuade children to go along to a holiday club.

We began work on angles in maths today, revising - or in some cases learning - how to use a protractor to measure angles. We also estimated and named angles (acute, obtuse, right-angle).

In ICT we completed our Control Logo programming, finishing writing our programs to control an advertising display to promote The Weakest Link.

This afternoon we picked up on our history work. The question was: how can we find out whether the Vikings ever came to the area around Nottingham? We decided that we could find out from books or the internet. After discussion, we realised that we could also find out by looking at the place names in the area to see if any of them have Norse elements. We then used local maps to help us answer he question. Later we sequenced a text about changes in Nottingham during the 10th century.

Report writing is coming to an end.

The hightlights of this week have included some music work - we have been using a simple mucis program (Compose World) to quickly create some melodies which we could then use to create song lyrics. The final task was to work out a short advertising jingle for a "Kids' Club".

We spent a lot of time on Thursday tracking the changes in angle and length of shadows, helping us to think about the apparent movement of the sun.

We did work on shape in maths and learned that the term "translation" has a special meaning in maths.

Friday was an INSET day.

I'm still busy writing reports, but these are some of this week's highlights:

we spent an afternoon investigating the 5 K's of Sikhism with a range of activities, including examining artefacts, video, reading and sorting statements, making a powerpoint presentation and creating our own wristband;

we have listened to and responded in writing and art to a wide range of different types of music;

we have planned a science investigation;

we had a day on a mini DT project to create a "randomiser" for a game.

We have had our first week back after half-term and I am busy writing End of Year reports so here are just a few of the highlights of this week.

We have started our new Design Technology topic which is to design and make an automaton.

We have spent a lot of time thinking about water supply in parts of Ethiopia (using the WaterAid web site) in which we played the game on the site and wrote a report.

We did some water colour painting, making a composition using wild flowers, leaves, twigs and stones.

We did a series of maths investigations to help us develop systematic approaches to these sorts of tasks.