MrJennings

We have been doing a mixture of new work and some "finishing off" before our week's half term holiday which has now begun.

We have thought about metaphor in poetry and also written a short story of our own, trying to include all the features we have learned about earlier in the term. In maths we did some work on measurement of capacity and converting between litres and millilitres and have also done some data handling work, tallying data, producing graphs and thinking about appropriate ways to group data.

After finishing our first science topic, we have tried to get into our second area of study which is Adaptation and Interdependence. So far, we have been learning about different habitats and ways in which animals can be adapted to their natural habitats. We have also started to think about how scientists divide the living world into groups.

We had our swimming lesson yesterday when some of us had the chance to see if they could achieve a new distance award and, today, we finished the half-term with an art lesson, trying to show a person in a series of poses as the go through a movement such as doing a cartwheel.

Our new half-term begins on Monday 29th October.

Our new unit in maths concerns measurement and data handling. So far, we have concentrated on thinking about measures - measuring lengths accurately to the nearest millimetre, converting between centimetres and millimetres and making sensible choices about the most appropriate measuring equipment and units to use in a range of situations.

In English, we have finished our poem about a storm involving lots of personification and we have also finished reading together and discussing our Awful Annie novel. We have also finished our science topic (with a short review test), used the data from a questionnaire to answer questions about tourism in mountain environments and made some suggestions for solving problems that arise when an area has high visitor levels.

Today, we had our usual Tuesday PE session with the YMCA, French and PSHCE...and then it was Parents' Evening.

In English we finished our stories and reviewed them using our success criteria sheets so that we could identify strengths and weaknesses in our own work. We also completed our display of "simile" poetry and studied a poem employing personification. We will think about this again next week.

In maths, we did a review test on Wednesday covering the work we have done so far this term. Yesterday and today, we did some work on number sequences - focusing on describing the sequences (including using algebra) and explaining how they can be continued.

We thought about the economics of running a hill farm in geography work, discussing the ways this sort of farm can provide income and the expenses involved in running them. Then we considered the advantages and disadvantages of diversification before planning our own farms designed to give us a good standard of living.

Today, after our Friday English and Maths groups, we did some art, using chalks to produce pictures for our People in Action topic and smudging the appropriate areas to suggest movement.

Our poetry work has moved on in two stages so far this week. We have edited and typed onto the computer our first poems. We then took these "adjective, adjective noun" poems and used one of the adjectives on each line to create a simile. These were also re-edited, corrected and written up. Almost all of us have also finished writing up our story to date.

In maths we looked at Pascal's triangle and the number patterns that are found in this series/sequence of numbers while, in science, we investigated the effect of changing the number of batteries and bulbs in an electric circuit.

Today we did a reading test and also had our PE session (with the YMCA) and PSHCE but no French today - our French teacher was busy elsewhere.

Today was an INSET day, so the children were not at school - just the teachers, who were checking, sorting and tidying resources for the different curriculum areas - and throwing away some old, unwanted materials and furniture.

We had our Harvest Festival on Wednesday morning, which was a very good occasion. In the afternoon we did some more maths on shape and did further work on our story. In this session, we discussed the climax of a story and how to change the pace of the narrative for the reader, then we wrote the climaxes for our own stories.

Yesterday we did some poetry work in English. We talked about simile, metaphor, alliteration and personification and then wrote simple, structured poems about animals. We also had our swimming lesson, spelling and tables tests and sorted out the homework before INSET day.

We have begun some work on shape in maths, revising knowledge of different 2-D shapes and some of their properties. Our focus today was on using terms like opposite and adjacent, parallel and perpendicular to help us be more specific when writing about the features of particular shapes.

Much of our time yesterday afternoon was spent practising our contribution for the harvest festival celebration tomorrow. We are doing a simulated radio discussion/outside broadcast about the competing arguments for buying "organic" food, "fair trade" food and "locally produced" food. We had a whole school rehearsal for this service this morning.

This afternoon we had our weekly French, PSHCE and YMCA PE sessions.