MrJennings

The new half term has begun and we have started new units of work in some subjects.

In science we have begun thinking about food chains and feeding relationships. We have learned about producers and different kinds of consumers and also considered the meanings of living, and dead extinct.

We have begun some fiction work in English, where our focus will be "suspense" stories. We have done some comprehension work on a story called Too frightening for me but have also been writing a "discussion" text about the merits of the evacuation during World War 2.

In maths we are working on addition and subtraction, including that of decimal numbers and using these processes in problem solving situations.

Yesterday we had our weekly French, handwriting and PE with the YMCA.

We have finished our "assessment week" activities yesterday with the mental maths test and we also completed the review tests for the science topics on materials that we have been working on this half term. We also did PE and used the computers to prepare some of the poetry work we did this half term for display.

Today we had our usual Friday English and maths sessions and, this afternoon, we did some word games and then some art. Today we were using just two colours to create a seascape and were trying out the "wet in wet" water colour technique.

We have now broken up for our half-term holiday.

School re-opens on Monday 26th February.

We have been doing a few more practise SATs papers this week, these being mainly the English writing tests. However, we have also found time to do a comprehension exercise based on a discussion text which fits with our current literacy topic.

In maths we have done some work on angles, including naming angles, estimating their size and measuring them using a protractor. We have also begun going through one of the maths tests that we completed last week picking up on areas of misunderstanding.

As well as our sessions of French, handwriting, spelling and PE, we have done some science (thinking more about reversible and permanent changes in materials) and some atlas work in geography. On Monday, we also did some more water colour work - focusing on painting trees.

This has seemed a very "short" week at school. We had an INSET day on Monday, on Wednesday we had an excellent theatre production in the school hall during the morning and all day on Thursday we had our Year 6 Science Day. This was very good. For half the day we were working with and investigating pendulums and the other half of the day was a "Crime Scene Investigation" session. In this we had to do a series of six chemical tests on different powders found at the homes of suspects and do some chromatography on the inks of different pens found at their homes. Then we could compare the results with materials and pens found at the crime scene itself.

As well as all this, we have done two practice maths SATs tests and some history work about the extent to which Nottingham was affected by the evacuation.

In science we have looked at what happens when a solution of a material like salt is evaporated. We condensed the water that was boiling off and considered what had happened and the underlying processes.

In English we have annotated an example of a written argument, noting the structure and organisation of the text and the key language features. Then we looked at different ways of planning an argument before drafting a counter-argument to the one we had read.

We had our special Friday English and maths groups today and had some time for PE yesterday afternoon.

We have begun a unit of work on evacuation in our history topic. We watched part of a video and a dvd in which evacuees recalled their various experiences. We also studied contemporary photographs to find the extent to which these matched up with some of the people's recollections. We have begun writing letters "in role" imagining that we were children evacuated at the beginning of World War II who had to write home describing what had happened to us.

We have done some geography fieldwork, collecting data from a traffic/pedestrian survey to support the case for having a new pedestrian gate for our school.

Our maths has focussed on fraction work - finding fractions (and percentages) of quantities and also having another go at converting between mixed numbers and improper fractions.