MrJennings

We have had a busy week preparing for our school summer fair this Saturday.

Year 6 has the job of making games for the fair and everyone has had to work in teams to design and make the games, write instructions, test them (to find out expected scores and determine the levels for prizes) and finally make posters to attract customer interest. The theme of this year's games is "reuse and recycle" and one of the ideas is that all the games should have been made out of materials that have been used before.

We have had some time for some other work. We have done some of our own technology project, working on levers and mechanisms and we have also done some music (choosing instruments and beginning to create our film score) and history. We have learned about Aztec farming (including how they built their chinampas) and about how children were brought up in Aztec times.

We have had our SATS results back and have been very pleased with our success.

We have started some new PSHCE work on changes, mainly focusing on thinking about feelings as we get ready for moving to new schools in September. We have also created a poster to help Year 5 children understand all about the concept of a healthy lifestyle.

We have done some more of our new music unit of work in which we will be creating a score for a short silent movie. We have now completed the storyboard and, next time, will mark on where the different instruments will be playing. At the same time we had a short ICT assessment task.

We have listened to some more of Kensuke's Kingdom and, yesterday morning, we began thinking about the games we will be making for our school's Summer Fair. In the afternoon we all went round to the Infants' School to help with their fair. We ran the games, collecting money and giving out prizes.

Today has been an INSET day.

We have spent some more time on map work this week, checking and improving our geographical knowledge of places in the UK, Europe and the wider world. Most of our groups have also finished the film that we have been creating in ICT.

Yesterday afternoon we spent some time on music, thinking about the music set to a short film. We analysed the use of instruments through the film and re-created the score after inventing symbols to represent the different sounds used.

Today we have had our Sports Relief day at school. We are a little early, but we linked the activity to the occasion of England's last football match in the World Cup group stage. Everyone was part of a team doing a relay to complete a mile. We also did some more work in our Buddhism topic in which we learned about some of the key teachings of the Buddha.

This afternoon we had our weekly PE session with the YMCA, French and our tables and spelling tests.

We have begun a new RE topic about Buddhism and learned about how Prince Siddhartha became Buddha. We watched a video retelling a Buddhist story and thought about its meaning before recounting the story of the Buddha's life.

We had a music morning in which we created a class orchestra, with two recorder parts and three percussion parts. We all tried at least four of the parts (one of the recorder parts was quite difficult) and by the lesson we could play together well - everyone holding their own part.

We have continued with our Kensuke's Kingdom work, finishing both the storm description and the character study activities ready to move on to something new next week.

This afternoon we continued with our design technology, completing our prototype pneumatic device.

In our extra ICT this week we have been doing some research about the countries competing in the current football world cup. For each country we have made an information sheet and built this into a classroom display.

We have finished the "storm" description, the second focus of our Kensuke's Kingdom work in English -we then created illustrations to go with our writing.

On Monday, we spent another session developing our videos (to the tune of Wonderful World). We should be able to finish these next week.

Because the football World Cup is taking place at the moment, we are taking the opportunity to check up on our political geography by marking the names of the participating countries on maps and researching some information about them.

This afternoon we had our PE session with the YMCA, French, tables test and also fitted in some poetry reading.

We have continued with our work on Kensuke's Kingdom, finishing the drafting of our character studies and moving on to work on the second task which is to write a really dramatic account of being on board a small sailing ship on a storm. We started off by thinking about figurative language: similes, metaphors and, today, personification. We have also done some problem solving in maths.

We spent yesterday afternoon thinking about homes in Aztec times, comparing those of ordinary Aztecs with their nobles, with our own homes and/or with homes of Viking people.

We have also begun our technology project - by creating nets ready for us to make pneumatically controlled pop-up or pop-out devices.

(Ofsted Inspectors visited our school yesterday and today.)

We have started new units of work in English and maths with the new half term.

In English we have begun work on a "transition unit" based on the Michael Morpurgo novel, Kensuke's Kingdom. We have discussed what we know of the author, and thought about the interesting opening to the first chapter. Today we started to think about the main characters we have "met" so far - Michael, his mother and his father.

Our maths work this week is working towards some problem solving, but to start with we have been thinking about decimals (ordering decimals and thinking about place value) and working out different number facts from our time tables knowledge.

On Monday we learned how to use digital cameras to make short movie clips. We learned some camera shot terminology (such as panning, tracking, close-up, long-shot) but were concentrating this time on holding the camera steady, leaving enough "lead time" etc., to capture a simple scene for our "What a wonderful world" movie.

We have also had music, PE with the YMCA and French.