MrJennings

In maths we have been continuing our thinking about percentages, trying to ensure everyone has a good understanding of the relationship between percentages and fractions and being able to manipulate fractions so that we can work out percentages of different quantities and numbers as easily as possible.

We have been writing up our finished versions of Matthew Webb's biography and some of us have been researching the life of a World War I army officer - ready to produce a time line showing the main details of his life and a short biography about him. Next we will be moving on to do some autobiographical writing.

Today we had our Friday maths and English sessions (the latter focusing on reading activities) and we did some of our RE topic - Faith in the Arts. We looked at how Hindu artists use symbolism to reflect and communicate their beliefs.

We have also done some more history and fitted in another Christmas Concert practise.

We have been continuing our work on biography and autobiography through reading and by writing a detailed recount of the first cross-channel swim by Captain Matthew Webb. We have been focusing on creating interesting, connected prose.

In maths, our work has continued to be about fractions and we have been thinking about mixed numbers and improper fractions before moving on to thinking about the relationship between fractions and division.

We have done singing, French, PE and PSHCE and, in addition, we have also spent some more time considering the preparations made by war-time home owners to protect themselves and their houses from damage caused by bombing.

We have continued our work on fractions in maths, practising how to cancel fractions and converting fractions to have a common denominator to help us compare and order them.

In English we have begun some biographical writing about Matthew Webb, the first person to swim the English Channel, and will be continuing this next week. We have also done an extended piece of writing in history, following some work on the Blackout. We learned about the purpose of the blackout and the effects it had on the inhabitants of towns and cities and have begun to write a letter to a newspaper in response to a complaint about its imposition.

We have also had PE, done some technology testing the strength of different column structures and some RE on the symbolism in pictures of the Hindu god, Ganesha, as well as having our Friday maths and English groups.

In English we have been writing some simple, short paragraphs of biography about the lives of some well-known personalities using some brief notes that have been prepared for us.

We have started working on fractions in maths. Yesterday we calculated fractions of simple numbers and today moved on to think about equivalent fractions and cancelling. We have also started our history topic properly, using information from the BBC website to begin thinking about a war-time home and the preparations that families made at home because of the expected air raids.

We had singing yesterday and French, PE and PSHCE this afternoon.

In mathematics over the last three days, we have been tackling some maths word problems, thinking about the best ways to approach these as well as recording our calculations and notes clearly.

We began thinking about biographical writing on Wednesday, by annotating a text about the early life of Beatrix Potter, but made no further progress because of the special activities for us on Thursday and Friday. Because today has been Children in Need: Do Something Different Day, we have been doing some "different" technology activities, including making a weighing machine for Pudsey, making a device to help Pudsey sort the coins collected and a device to help Old Pudsey pick up things which have been dropped on the floor.

We have still had time for an afternoon of practical science activities, in which we investigated weighing things in air and the effect of increasing weight on an elastic band.

We have done some work on computation and calculations in maths over the last couple of days and also continued finding some areas and perimeters of more complex shapes.

In English, although we have been due to start a new unit on biographical and autobiographical writing, we had our Autumn Fiction Task today, when we had to write a complete short story, so yesterday, we reminded ourselves of the story writing work we did earlier in the term.

We continued creating slides for our Powerpoint presentation in ICT/geography on Monday before doing some more singing, and this afternoon we had our usual Tuesday PE session with the YMCA, then French and PSHCE.

We have drafting, edited and written up a geography report about mountain animals and how they survive the difficult conditions in the natural surroundings and have checked these against our success criteria. Next week we will be moving on to a new area of study in English.

Our maths work on finding areas and perimeters has continued and we have also thought some more about converting between units (e.g. grams to kilograms, millilitres to litres and vice versa).

We have started some science work on forces, thinking about different types of forces, revising some work on friction and doing a quick experiment investigating the grip of trainers and shoes on different surfaces. We did PE yesterday, had our Friday English and maths sessions this morning and finished the week with some design technology.

In our maths work this week we have been concentrating on finding perimeters of shapes and areas of squares and rectangles. We have just begun thinking about how we can find the area of compound rectilinear shapes. We have continued thinking about report writing in English, using our success criteria to help us improve our paragraphs about mountain plants. We have also done some "exercises", altering the order of words in the sentences of our reports to increase the variety of sentence structures and make them more interesting to read.

We have begun some research in preparation for creating Powerpoint presentations about one of the major mountain chains around the world and also started our singing in music. Our songs are being prepared ready for our Christmas concert. We have also had our usual PE session with the YMCA and our weekly French and PSHCE sessions this afternoon.

We have continued with our data handing in maths (moving on to some problem solving challenges and calculating the arithmetic mean) and with our report writing in English and geography. Today we worked with a partner to write a well-organised paragraph about mountain plants.

Yesterday, we have our final swimming session. Despite having some difficulty with the bus thie week, many of us did some good distance swimming and some even achieved a personal survival award.

Today we finished the week by starting our new RE topic on Faith in the Arts.