MrJennings

We have been thinking about probability in maths this week, describing the chance of particular events occurring both in words (e.g. certain, unlikely, evens, etc.) and by using fractions or percentages. We have also carried out short maths experiments after predicting likely outcomes.

We have also continued to units of work we started in English and history last week. We have looked at a new ghost story in English, studying how the author has employed the various techniques we thought about last week and discussing how we can show characters' feelings in our own writing. In history, we have continued drafting our "evacuees" letter.

Today, we also had our PE session with YMCA Sport in the Community, French and PSHCE. Some of us went to an area athletics competition this afternoon and our school did well enough (coming second overall) to go through to the regional finals later in the term.

We have continued our work on "suspense" stories by writing an episode to follow the passage that we studied for the comprehension exercise on Tuesday and, yesterday, we did a practice SATs reading test. In maths we have done further work on the mean, median and mode, this time basing our calculations on data from graphs and charts.

We have spent some more time thinking about the evacuation of children during World War 2. We produced a "timetable" for evacuation day based on our earlier researches, used a series of photographs taken on 3rd September 1939 showing the children being evacuated and then read recollections recorded by evacuees later in life, classifying these to indicate whether the people recalled good or bad experiences.

Today we had our Friday English and maths sessions and then did some art to decorate the hall for our Year 3 and 4 production later this term.

We began new units of work in both English and maths yesterday. In English we will be thinking about narrative writing again, this time concentrating on mystery/ghost stories and how authors create suspense and build tension. So far we have annotated a short mystery story and done a comprehension exercise on passages from a "ghost" story. Our maths work for the next couple of weeks is based on measurement and data handling and we have already worked on changing measurements from one unit (e.g. grams) to another (kilograms or even metric tonnes).

We have thought more about the process of the evacuation in World War 2, this time gathering information from the internet, and we have also had music, PE, French and PSHCE.

In English, we have consolidated our work on writing in different forms by finishing our ananlysis of our own work (using our success criteria checklists) and finishing writing up final versions while, in maths, we have done further work on number patterns and describing them by using formulae.

Yesterday we did PE, developing and practising sequences of movement in gymnastics with and without a partner. This week's focus was introducing balances into our sequences and using a vocabulary to describe different balances.

We have also begun a new unit of work in our history topic about World War 2 by watching a video about the evacuation and making notes in order to create a simple paragraph to introduce this theme.

Today we had our Friday English and maths groups and, in the afternoon, continued make our shelters in DT.

We have continued to base our English work on the Flanimals characters this week. First we wrote a letter about them and then wrote a newspaper report about the discovery of a colony of flanimals - drafting, improving and writing-up our work.

Our maths has focused on the properties of shape. We have concentrated on the properties of the sides of 2-D shapes (including length properties and whether opposite/adjacent sides may be parallel or perpendicular). We had also been doing some calculations involving square numbers.

We have brought our science work on light to a conclusion with the review test of the unit. Earlier in the week we wrote up our "reflectivity" experiment during ICT time, using MS Word for the report and MS Excel to tabulate the results and produce a bar chart to show the results. We also did some work on vocabulary related to light including: transparent, translucent and opaque.

Yesterday, we had our weekly PE session with the YMCA, PSHCE and French. We also did music on Monday.

The first week of our spring term has come and gone very quickly!

We have been working hard on our writing in English, completing some newspaper reports and some descriptive writing. Our journalistic writing was based on a police incident we experienced in an internet-based activity involving some children who had gone missing while our descriptive writing was based on the books of Flanimals created by Ricky Gervais.

In maths we have been concentrating on mental maths, written calculations and number sequences - describing these in words and formulae using symbols.

We have had a couple of special science afternoons. One of these was spent undertaking a series of practical activities involving mirrors and lenses to consider how light travels while the other was spent devising a properly controlled experiment to discover which of a selection of materials reflects light the best.

To finish the week, we continued with our shelters project in design technology.