MrJennings

It has been incredibly hot at school this week!

We spent much of the day on Monday progressing our Design Technology control project and yesterday morning, after using a little time to continue with the Kensuke work, was taken up with presenting the music concert to the school. The concert was performed to a hall of baking parents in the evening. As well as solo and group violin and recorder pieces, there was a performance of a musical based on Oliver! This went extremely well, was very well received by the audience and much enjoyed by the singers and actors.

Today in school all the Year 6 pupils participated in a simulation game based upon life in an Aztec village. Their groups had to work together as families, managing their annual budget of food, making sure that the next years crops were tended properly and increasing the family's stock of possessions.

This week, I have spent a lot of time setting up a new blog for the whole class to use. (CLICK HERE: Mr Jennings' class weblog) Everyone has been given a username and password and has had the chance to create at least one post and comment on those that others have made. I have tried various page designs and experimented with different options to create a layout that suits our needs best.

In addition, we have done some Kensuke work, thinking about how the relationship between Michael and Kensuke develops through the novel and discussing how the book will end.

We had our school sports' day on Thursday and everyone in the class helped with this. (We set up all the equipment in the morning and, in the afternoon, everyone in Year 6 acted as team captains, vice captains or scorers.) Read all about it in our class blog - see link above.

We have also spent some more time this week on our technology project. On Wednesday, a group of pupils from Year 6 went to Sheffield to participate in a different design technology activity called Airborne Challenge. They had already built elastic band powered balsa/tissue paper plane (called darts) and made helicopters of their own design. Our team won three out of six trophies awarded and hold the record for the longest flight with the darts - a brilliant effort.

We have spent quite a lot more time on our Kensuke work and everyone has completed the retelling of the episode in which Michael is attacked by jellyfish. This has been written up and illustrated.

We have done some research about aspects of life in Aztec times and in ancient Egypt and have been following some of our own lines of enquiry.

On Thursday, almost all of us visited the secondary schools that we will be moving to in September. Those of us who did stay in school investigated themes in different periods of history that we have studied at Westdale.

On Friday afternoon we did some more of our technology project. Some of the levers mechanisms are beginning to take shape now.

Now the Summer Fair is over - another success on a day of lovely weather - we have settled to start a new section of work based on Michael Morpurgo's Kensuke's Kingdom novel. Our task this time has been to write an episode of the story from the point of view of Kensuke. (The novel itself is written from Michael's point of view.)

Most of us have now finished our "What a Wonderful World" music video, although there are still some groups that haven't quite finished, and we watched some of these at the end of the day. We did some work on our Egypt folder where we will put all the geography and history homework that we have on this topic. Yesterday we also did some more of our RE topic about Buddhism. This time we were thinking about Buddhist communities and about the lives of children growing up in a religious community.

Today we had our PE session with the YMCA and French. We listened to some more of Kensuke's Kingdom and spent some time trying to finish our recount from Kensuke's point of view. We also did some music, finishing our sound effects score for a silent film and performing it to the rest of the class.