MrJennings

We began our new half term with a special afternoon activity to launch a new history topic. We explored the contents of a small "lost suitcase". This contained various items which we studied and investigated in order to develop a theory concerning the owner. The objects, and the research that we did on them allowed us to understand that the case had belonged to an individual (we were able to guess the age and gender) of someone who had lived at the time of the late 1930s. This made a super start to our work on life in Britain during World War 2.

In ICT we continued with our Powerpoint presentations about a mountain region and in maths we have had two sessions following up issues arising from the test that we did just before half-term.

Today, in English, we began some work on fiction writing by thinking about the openings of stories and this afternoon we had our weekly French, handwriting/spelling and YMCA PE sessions.

We have been working to finish our unit of work about report writing, focusing on building good paragraphs by writing about how animals are adapted to live in mountain environments. We have also done some comprehension work on a later section of the Shrinking of Treehorn story.

In maths we have revised work on measures of central tendency by working out the mode, median and range of sets of numbers and solving some maths problems relating these notions. Yesterday, we had our half-termly maths test.

We have begun to think about our new science topic on forces and today, in addition to our Friday Maths and English groups, we also did some music in which we worked in small groups to create percussion sequences involving several players using different instruments combining to produce complex rhythms.

We have now broken up for our autumn half-term holiday. School begins again in one week.

Continuing our work on non-chronological reports, we have written about our Kingswood weekend and, today, about an important mountain region. We are trying to make sure that our paragraphs are well organised and the sentences are varied in structure and employ good connectives.

The maths work this week is all to do with data handing. The focus yesterday was on probability and the language of probability while today's work moved on to tallying, drawing graphs and selecting appropriate class intervals for particular sets of data.

We had a "geography afternoon" on Monday, using a text book to help us answer questions about the weather in mountainous regions and this included some graph work to complement our maths activities. Today we had our usual French, handwriting and PE sessions.

We have continued our work on building good paragraphs in English, doing this in the context of our Mountains topic and thinking about the kinds of plants growing in mountain regions, while our maths has moved on to ordering fractions (based on converting them to the same denominator) and finding percentages of more difficult numbers.

We had a swimming session on Thursday afternoon and then had our weekly tables test and sorted out homework for next week.

Today we had our Friday English and maths groups and then almost all the class went off to Kingswood for an activity weekend.

In English this week we are thinking about non-chronological reports. We finished annotating an example of this sort of writing and today we wrote a paragraph together about the weather on mountains. Our main focus is going to be writing well-organised paragraphs.

Our maths work is a continuation of lasts week's, and we have been thinking more about fractions. Yesterday we concentrated on cancelling to simplify fractions and today we were using our ability to put fractions into the same denominator to allow us to order fractions and to add fractions.

We had a reading test on Monday and also a science test to finish off our work on Electricity. Today we had our French lesson, spelling test, handwriting and PE.

We have continued with our poetry work, drafting another poem (using a different structure) and then developing and copying up our favourite for a class display. We also had time to begin thinking about some aspects of non-chronological reports ready for next week's English work.

In maths we did some work on decimals (focusing on decimal equivalents of fractions) and percentages (finding percentages of numbers and quantities).

We have concluded the main work in our science topic on electricity by revising ways in which we might change the brightness of bulbs in electric circuits and extending this to finding the effects of using long, thin wires in the circuits.

We had swimming on Thursday afternoon and today has been an INSET day.

We finished our work on biographical writing by creating a final paragraph, including a brief reflection on Matthew Webb's achievement and by then thinking about what we had learned in this two week study. Today in English we wrote some poetry.

Our maths work this week is about fractions, decimals and percentages and, so far, we have thought about equivalent fractions.

We have been practicing for our school harvest service which takes place tomorrow, but have also had time for ICT, art (developing our "stick figures" into "fleshed out" people), French, handwriting/spelling and PE.