MrJennings

We have begun a new unit of work in English, learning about discussion texts. We have looked at a discussion text about mobile phones and annotated it to show the way the text is organised and the important language features. We have compared it with another, similar text and also thought about how the author planned this text. We have also started a new Science unit, beginning by revising work we did in Year 5 on the life cycle of plants.

In maths, we have concentrated on thinking about the different strategies that we can use to do mental addition and subtraction sums. We have practised these and thought about the best strategy to use for particular number combinations.

During our ICT time, we looked at a website introducing the idea of rationing during World War 2 and used the word processor to explore the use of punctuation in a discussion text.

This afternoon we had our weekly YMCA PE session, French and handwriting.

In maths we have looked at reflection and rotation of shapes. We have learned about orders of rotation and how to rotate a shape either about a corner or about another point. Our English work focused on persuasive writing.

We have had our usual weekly French, handwriting, PE and Friday groups, but our main work this week has been science. We had a special day on Thursday when we spent half the day on a series of forensic science activities to solve a made-up crime and, in the afternoon, we did a series of activities on pendulums.

In ICT we spent some time researching Hindu religious symbols, we checked our a BBC Science Clips activity and also looked at our school website. We spent our maths time today checking up on some of the mistakes that we had made on the maths tests that we did last week and in English we thought about persuasive vocabulary that could be used in advertisements.

We ended the day with science. We did some practical work thinking about reactions when some materials are mixed with different liquids. We used sodium bicarbonate and made observations when we dripped on to this liquids including vinegar, tartaric acid and lemon juice.

On Thursday, we finished our tests. We did a written maths paper in the morning (this was the one in which we could use a calculator) and there was a mental maths paper in the afternoon. We tried some science activities, thinking about permanent and non-permanent changes, and also did PE - practising some hockey skills and then playing some small-team games.

Today we had our usual Friday English and Maths groups in the morning and, after giving out homework, we did art this afternoon. We were working on sculpture. We began by using K'Nex and then developed sculptures using simple card strips and paperclips to hold them together. When the design was complete we used glue to stick the strips together in position. Later, when the glue was dry, the paperclips were removed.

Today we started the day with some science work. We made some detailed observations of a candle burning, recording these, and thought about what was actually burning. We also thought some more about reversible and irreversible processes. We also did a maths test in the morning. (Two more tomorrow.)

This afternoon, we had a theatre group visit school. They presented a performance of a play called More tea, vicar? through which they communicated a lot of science information related to the topics that we study at school.

We are having our "half yearly" test week this week. On these two days we have done some "writing" tests. These have been a spelling test and two timed creative writing tasks. The first one was to write an advertisement and the second was to write a story.

We have done some revision work in our maths lessons, ready for our maths tests tomorrow and the day after.

On Monday we looked as some grammar work - thinking about and discussing common grammar mistakes. We also had a music lesson on reading music notation - focusing on note lengths. Today we had our French, handwriting and YMCA lesson of PE.

We have continued with our story writing work, spending time evaluation our own writing and creating an ending for the "Too frightening for me" story. We have also thought about the plots of a series of short stories and tried to summarise these to help is with planning our own stories.

In maths we have been trying to solve more difficult problems involving percentages and fractions of quantities (such as 300m or £475) as well as numbers.

In art we have spent a long time this week on a sketching and drawing task for an art display and exhibition entitled Close up magnification. We filled an open matchbox-sized box with all sorts of tiny objects then drew this, magnified many times, on a piece of paper. We tried different types of shading in our sketch books and used some of these on our pictures. We also used pencil crayon to colour these pictures.

We also did some sketching in geography when we drew sketch maps of the area outside our school where we are considering providing an additional pedestrian-only entrance.