MrJennings

Yesterday we spent some more time on our latest Kensuke's Kingdom task. First, we studied an extract from The Wind in the Willows (where Mole encounters "The River" for the first time) and considered Kenneth Grahame's use of personification. Then we discussed how we could use personification in our own accounts of a storm at sea before writing first drafts.

We had a session of filming clips for our digital video project and, in history, did some work about childhood in Aztec times. We used pictures taken from the Codex Mendoza to find out about the jobs that children were expected to do at different ages, the amount of food they were given and the punishments they might receive. In PE we did some athletics. Throwing the javelin, 50 m sprint and the standing long jump were the events we tried.

Today we did a special project with Mr. Harrison which we will finish this afternoon.

We spent some more time on music this morning. First we watched a short silent movie and listened to the accompanying musical sound track featuring a range of sound effects made by percussion instruments. Then we created a music score for this, creating icons to represent the different instruments and to show when and how they were being played at different points. After that we studied another short film and this time created our own soundtrack.

In the afternoon we had French, did a maths investigation and finished the day with PE.

Today we continued our Kensuke's Kingdom work. We read the next part of the story and then thought about a storm at sea by studying and episode from earlier in the book, listening to some sound recordings and watching some video clips. We used these experiences to make notes of descriptive words and phrases and then began to think of suitable similes and metaphors that could be used to enrich description of a storm at sea.

After that we did some more maths investigations and spent the afternoon on our Design Technology. Our focus today was creating a net for a cube to create a "jack-in-a-box" type pop-up device using pneumatics.

We had a "Music Day" today - where all the classes had a series of special music activities. These included:

• American Square Dancing
• Body percussion
  
• Creating incidental music to match the TV show
• Handbell orchestra
  
• Investigating musical instruments
• Music genre quiz
• Pentatonic scales - "dragon music"
  
• Picturing the scene - creating art to match the music

Everyone had an exciting, if tiring, day.

Tomorrow and Monday are INSET days for our school.

We have done quite a lot of practical work this week: In science we planned and carried out our own experiments to try to find out which is the best brand of eraser for rubbing out pencil and crayon, making sure that our tests were fair and the results reliable. We have also done and short Design Technology project, making a "randomiser" device for a board game about a woodland adventure.

We have thought about and discussed our ideas and concerns about moving up to secondary school later this year and visited our neighbouring infant school to help them run their summer fair.

Yesterday we also had our weekly French, handwriting and YMCA PE sessions.

This week has seen us continue with our history work on the Aztecs - this time thinking about the homes that they had and comparing the homes of rich and poor with our own homes. We have also read some more of Kensuke's Kingdom and done some maths work.

We have also started some new pieces of work - an RE unit about Buddhism (in which we learned about the life of the Buddha; thought about his experiences and listened to one of the stories he used to teach his followers) and music work on describing and responding to music.

We have also spent quite a lot of time on our Summer Fair Games. We are designing and making games for people to play at our School Summer Fair on Saturday. As well as the games, we have been making posters, writing rules and testing the games to make sure they work properly.

We have continued our work on Kensuke's Kingdom, writing character studies of Michael's (the main character's) father. We have also completed a chart listing the changes that occurred in the family's life after the parents received their redundancy notices.

Also, we have continued our history work on the Aztecs by writing up our ideas about life in Aztec times, derived from studying a picture and then learning something Aztec writing.

In music we have used Compose World again to create short pieces of music that we have then created lyrics to fit the music, making sure that the syllables matched the notes/rhythm well.

We have begun thinking about the games we are going to make for the school summer fair a week tomorrow and, this afternoon, we have had another go at the aboriginal art that we first tried during Arts Week just before half-term.

With a new half-term beginning, we have started new units of work in several areas of the curriculum.

In English, we have been looking at chapter 1 of the Michael Morpurgo novel, Kensuke's Kingdom. (This is the book for our Year 6/7 transition unit.) Having read the first chapter, we have been doing some work on the characters including text marking and note making. In maths, we have been thinking about scale drawing. This has involved drawing diagrams at different scales and interpreting scale drawings.

We have spent some time on art/technology activities including some "sculpture" work using strips of card and, today, our challenge was to create the tallest, self supporting tower using a piece of 8 x 8 cm card. (The best ones were over 40 cm high.)