MrJennings

We have finished writing and editing the "build-up" for our stories and (most of us) have also finished copying up final, improved drafts. These have taken the stories to the point at which our "pet" is missing and has just escaped into the big, bad world! Next week we will be writing the climax and resolution.

Division, including division of decimal numbers has been the focus of our maths work after some further activities on factors and prime factors. We have had another swimming lesson, done some more drawing of figures and two science in which we learned the "official" symbols for several electrical components (including light bulbs, wires, batteries and switches) before creating circuits to match circuit diagrams we were given and then drawing circuit diagrams to correctly record circuits we had made.

Next week we have our harvest festival at school.

We have been continuing with our fiction work in English, writing the opening to our own stories about a escaped pet. We have been trying to make sure that we use some good connectives and include good description. Today, we have further improved these openings and also discussed and began writing the "build-up" of these stories.

In maths we have done some more mental maths involving multiplication (including multiplying decimals by 20, 200, 50, 500, etc.). We have also done some more science - making circuits to light bulbs and looking at the components carefully to make a bulb light with the minimum of components.

We used Microsoft Excel to make a cost totalling spreadsheet in ICT yesterday and, today, we had PE with the YMCA and a special languages quiz as part of our European Day of Languages celebrations (which properly takes place tomorrow).

We have spent more time on our geography topic, beginning to think, in detail, about the Lake District as an example of a mountain environment. After watching an introductory video showing aspects of life in that area, we have been studying aspects of forestry and its influence in the region.

In English, we have studied another short story - analysing the development of the writing through opening, build-up, dilemma/climax, resolution and ending. We looked at the opening most closely before writing openings to stories of our own. We will work further on these next week.

We have had another music session, using glockenspiels to compose, practise and perform pieces involving repeated "question and answer" phrases, accompanied with rhythms played on "metallic" untuned percussion instruments. We have also begun our first science topic of the year by thinking about electricity - discussing what we already know and making sure that everyone is aware of the dangers of mains electricity.

We had swimming yesterday and the school photographer came today.

Our main new work this week so far has been to really get under way with the main focus of our geography topic for this term - mountain environments. We used the internet to discover some basic information about some of the main mountain ranges of the world - noting their locations, marking these on a map of the world, recording the name and height of the highest mountain in each of these ranges and on each continent.

In English, we have looked at some "sentence level work" again, thinking about description and expanded noun phrases in particular. We have been reading a book (Awful Annie by J. B. Simpson) which has some very good description, which we have discussed and we have also written descriptive openings to a traditional story.

Our main maths work has involved multiplying decimal numbers - both mentally and using written methods - and today we have been rounding and approximating numbers.

Our maths work has focused on negative numbers, including finding differences between positive and negative numbers (in the context of temperatures) and place value - multiplying and dividing numbers (including decimal numbers) by 10, 100 and 1000.

We have been working on two different aspects of English. We have been discussing and writing story openings in different styles - action openings and dialogue openings - and also thinking about creating more interesting sentences by using good connectives and including expanded noun phrases.

We have had another music session in which we worked in groups to create rhythm patterns with either wooden or metal percussion instruments and we have also had a couple of art lessons. In these we have studied the drawing of figures, beginning with stick-figures in different action poses and then learning how to "bulk out" this framework to produce a better constructed figure.

We have begun a unit of work about fiction texts in English. We are working towards developing our ideas about different fiction genres, but much of our work will focus on learning to analyse and think about the structure of stories. We will also be working on developing the variety of sentence structures we use in our own writing.

Yesterday we thought about different kinds of texts - non-fiction and different types of stories - and today we looked at a short story entitled Rugby and the Snake, exploring the opening, build-up, climax, resolution and ending, and thinking about the plan that the author may have had in mind when she was writing these elements.

In maths we have been doing some work about place value, reading and writing large numbers and counting forwards and backwards in steps of 5, 4 and seven.

We used our ICT session to go on the internet and find information about different environments or biomes to help us produce a spider diagram highlighting the features of these different sorts of places.

This afternoon, we had our French lesson, PSHCE session and PE with the YMCA teachers.

We have continued with our introductory activities, moving on to check and revise work on multiplication and division in maths and completing another comprehension exercise and listening to and discussing two short stories in English.

We have also continued our "thinking skills" topic, reflecting on rules that the group might adopt to try to ensure personal health and safety of its members. Today we had our first music session, working as groups to compose and perform short repeating rhythmic patterns, and our first art session for our unit of work on People in Action. Yesterday we had our first PE lesson of the term - we did some relay activites with the other Year 5 and 6 classes.

Term has begun and we have started the new year with some basic English and Maths work and a cross-curricular topic.

In English, we have done some comprehension work based on the story of The Shrinking of Treehorn, answering questions which require detailed responses, while our maths work has focused on addition and subtraction calculations.

Our topic has covered ideas about health, safety and personal responsibility from the starting point of being lost. This work has involved lots of "thinking skills" activities (and the challenge of building our own shelters using sticks, leaves and litter) and is forming an introduction to our geography work on Mountain and Other Environments.