MrJennings

We have spent some times on our science work, finishing our work on How we see on Tuesday with the "End of Unit" test. We made calendars to take home on Monday afternoon. These were paper sculpture designs of flowers and leaves in thin white card mounted on coloured card.
We did some further RE work on thinking about the symbolism represented in aspects of the Christingle and then designed and made greetings cards connected to the theme of light either for Christmas for a Christian, Hanukkah for a Jew or Diwali for a Hindu or Sikh.

We also had our Christmas Party this week (on Tuesday afternoon), a service of readings and carols this morning and the whole school watched a video together this afternoon.

We now have our Christmas break and I wish you all a happy Christmas.

This has been our week of Christmas concerts and they went very well. The performances were also very well supported by parents and friends.

There has been less time for ordinary lessons, but we have done some more summarising, began a newspaper report (about our Christmas production) and tried some maths investigations (one about shape and one involving permuations and combinations). A major piece of our work this week has been carrying out two experiments investigating shadows. These involved careful measuring, repeating tests and then producing results tables, graphs and conclusions. We have also had PE, our usual Friday English and maths groups and continued with our RE.

At the end of last week we spent some time on preparing for our Christmas production. We did a maths test on Thursday and, as well as having a PE session and doing our spelling test, we wrote up the report for the science experiment we did on reflectivity that we had carried out earlier in the week. On Friday morning we had our special English and Maths groups as usual.

We have been doing our English work through our RE studies today. We began by using the Authorised Bible version of the Christmas Story to look for words which are no longer used in everyday English. We also looked at verb endings which are no longer commonly used. Later in the day we thought about the Jewish festival of Hanukkah. We listened to the story and then had to sequence a written version of the story.

During our session in the computer room we used the BBC Science Clips site to think some more about our topic on Light and then did some more work on spreadsheets.

We also gave the first performance of our Christmas Concert. The Year 3 and 4 children came to watch as did the Year 2 children from the infant school.

As well as our maths (continuing with our work on number sequences) we did some science yesterday morning, writing up the experiment on reflective materials that we did on Monday. We also had our French, handwriting and YMCA session of PE.

Today we started the day of with a run-through of our Christmas production and then did some more maths work on sequences. Today we concentrated on the sequence of triangular numbers. This afternoon we did some art and RE work. We studied two pictures depicting the Christmas story and discussed a wide variety of aspects of the work (including the palette used, the media, the composition, the symbolism and our response/preferences). Then we used the "picture from memory" technique to explore one further picture - a "nativity icon". After re-creating the picture in groups using this technique we did a little writing to record our thoughts about the way the artist had represented religious ideas in the picture.

Today in maths we have been thinking about number sequences. We have been trying to identify the "rule" by which a sequence has been created as well as completing sequences.

We followed up work in a previous week's maths topic in ICT when we used a spreadsheet program to produce a graph plotting data based on a table we created of details about rectangles which had the same perimeter. We began by producing a table of lengths and widths of rectangles which had a perimeter of 20 cm. Then we used the function option to calculate the areas of these rectangles before plotting all this data on a line graph.

This afternoon we planned and carried out an investigation as part of our work on light. A clothing company had asked us to test different materials to see which would be the best one to use to create a reflective strip on jackets for cyclists to use at night. We had to plan an experiment, make notes about how we were going to make this a fair test and then do the experiment.

In English we have written a further passage for our biography of Matthew Webb, concentrating upon his famous channel swim, and we have done more problem solving in maths.

On Thursday afternoon we had a percussionist come to school to give a performance. He demonstrated a range of instruments and also used an electronic drum kit and a synthesizer to perform music in a range of styles.

Today we had our special Friday English and maths groups and, after practising the songs for our Christmas concert in the afternoon, we finished the day with design technology. We tested the strength of the beams we made last week and then began creating some strong "board-type" structures using card and art-straws.