MrJennings

Our last day before half term!
We had our usual, Friday English and Maths groups today and also this morning we had a visit of Footprints Theatre to our school. This afternoon we had a reading test and then did some art for our People in Action project. Today we used chalks to create our figures and the smudged the chalk to suggest movement.

We now have a week's holiday for half-term and school begins again on 31st October.

We finished our science unit on Forces by thinking more about objects falling in air. Some of us timed different "cones" falling to the ground and others investigated "spinners". We completed our work with a little "review" test.

In maths on Wednesday we did a little bit of revision of the work we have already covered this half term in preparation for a test we did today. Later we did some English work thinking about different connectives and then some of the class took their turn to give their Mountain Region powerpoint presentation to the class.

Today, in addition to the maths test, we made some lists of different types of connectives, completed our Record of Achievement sheet for our science work and had our swimming lesson.

Our English work this week is concentrating on ways of writing good sentences. Today and yesterday we have been thinking about using verbs in the active form and passive form. Today we started by looking at a powerpoint presentation about active and passive verbs, then played active-passive "Chinese Whispers" before doing some independent work.

In maths we have been continuing our "data handling" work - learning how to find the range, the mode, the median and the mean of a set of data. Today we revised these and tried to write explanations of how to work out these values.

On Monday we did a simple science experiment to help us begin thinking about the forces involved in objects falling through air and then we completed our powerpoint presentations on an important mountain range. Today we had our weekly French, handwriting and YMCA PE session.

We finished our poems, corrected them and copied them up today in English. In maths we did some work about pie charts, including some difficult problems which required several steps of reasoning.

We had a special event at school in the morning when S & P Productions came and gave an excellent presentation of a play called Pack up your Troubles. This was a lively, fast moving drama which reflected the significant international and national events of World War II in the lives of an ordinary English family. It was a riveting play, conveying important information in an entertaining manner, and one which should provide good background information for our history work on that period of British History next half term.

We had our swimming session yesterday and our special Friday English and maths groups this morning. We did our weekly spelling and tables tests, some admin. and finished off with a music lesson.

We have compared two poems in English - one by Grace Nichols and one by John Keats - looking at their word choice as well as aspects of organisation and patterning. We developed this by writing lines of our own to match the different styles of these poets. Today, we extended this by writing similarly structure poems but, in ours, we used powerful, active verbs and similes in our lines of poetry.

In maths we have been working on data handling - tallying a set of data, creating groupings and presenting the information using graphs. We have also spent time discussing factors that need to be taken into account when grouping data.

We had our PE with the YMCA on Tuesday afternoon following our French and handwriting sessions and, today, we also spent some more time on our geography powerpoint presentation and did some science. This concentrated on understanding the notion of upthrust in water - using practical experiences (including "feeling the force") to help us think through the ideas.

In maths today we began a new area of study. We thought about probability today - specifically concentrating on understanding evens and equal probability. We also did some work which involved us considering probability in term of fractions.

We continued building our Powerpoint presentations in ICT, with different groups researching the Himalayas, the Alps, the Andes and the Rocky Mountains.

Literacy work this week will still concentrate on poetry, but today we focused on similes as and aspect of figurative language. We discussed "traditional" or well-known similes (like "as flat as a pancake") and created some "new" ones.

To finish the day, we did some art work. We made flick-books as part of our topic on people in motion.

Today we had our "Friday" maths and English groups because tomorrow is an INSET day. This afternoon we did our spelling and tables tests, did some necessary admin (including giving out homework activities) and went swimming.

We have had our harvest festival today. Our part of the service (with the other Year 6 class) was about our responsibility for caring for our world - which made us think about avoiding waste, saving energy, the ozone layer and the importance of the rainforests. The message was that we all need to "do our bit".

In maths we have done some more work on relating fractions, decimals and percentages and in English we have written a poem using the structure of a Grace Nichols poem.

We had our French, handwriting and YMCA sessions yesterday and this afternoon we did some practical work in science - exploring the effect on the length of an elastic band of adding weights to a bag it is supporting. We measured and recorded the amount of "stretch" and drew graphs to show our results clearly.

We began an new area of study in English, thinking about poetry. Today we looked at two "classic" poems - discussing and making notes about meaning, organisation, rhyme and rhythm. We also practised our dictionary skills as we looked up the meaning of archaic vocabulary. Our maths work today focused on relating fractions and decimal fractions to percentages before we moved on to begin working out percentages of numbers.

In ICT we looked at an example of a powerpoint presentation about Snowdonia. Then we used information from a CD-ROM to begin making bullet-points for our own presentations about different major world mountain ranges. We finished the day by practising our Harvest presentation.