MrJennings

We have had a back-to-front couple of days, with our Friday English and maths groups taking place on Thursday this week! This was because we were having visitors at school today. In the afternoon we played hockey in PE after working on passing and trapping skills - and making sure that we were using the hockey stick safely!

Today we did some more English work on written arguments, thinking about the different feelings people had about a planning proposal to build a new factory on some park land. In maths we worked on solving problems.

We had a special art afternoon today, with Mrs Gluszkowski showing us techniques to help sketch and draw faces of people in profile.

We had a super day on our Timetravelling visit to Southwell Minister on Monday. We travelled by coach, arriving at the Minster at about 9.50 am ready for the parade into the minister with about three hundred other junior school pupils. There was a welcome and an "assembly" before we began a series of four different activities. Three more followed after lunch. There was a great variety of things to do including making prayer beads, finding out about the communion service and baptism, learning more about Fairtrade, pretending to be part of the Minster choir, learning how to "sign" one of the Timetravelling songs and studying the organ. As well as this, we had some time to look at the beautiful building.

On Tuesday, we followed up our visit by producing a quick Powerpoint presentation, including some of the photos and movies that we took while we were at Southwell. We also did some maths work on coordinates in the morning before our usual Tuesday afternoon PE session with the YMCA, French and PSHCE.

Today, the focus for our maths was rotating shapes and we did some of this on a coordinate grid, building on yesterday's work. In English, we began writing an argument in favour of allowing children to have mobile phones in primary schools. We wrote the first two paragraphs of our work after practising writing the introduction for a series of different arguments. We are trying hard to make clearly focused paragraphs and present the points in a convincing way. In science, we finished off some work on dissolving by writing up our results and findings, trying to form good, clear conclusions using two comparatives.

In a change to our planned geography work, we used the internet to find out more about the earthquake that woke many of us up last night. We marked the epicentre on a map and found out some other facts about this earthquake before, as a class, we looked at what causes earthquakes and the effects they can have.

In ICT we did some more work on spreadsheets, using MS Excel to calculate areas and perimeters of rectangles so that we could explore how these numbers changed as lengths and widths were changed. We used copy and paste to repeat formulae and "auto-create" to produce sequences of numbers for the lengths and widths. Some of us went on to create a further spreadsheet to help calculate costs related to our visit to Southwell Minster on Monday.

We have continued our thinking about arguments in English, concentrating on planning organised written work. We did this by taking an issue (Should children be allowed to have mobile phones in schools?) and thinking of lots of ideas (for and against). Then we sorted these ideas under important sub-headings to help us build good paragraphs.

Yesterday we finished our current work on angles, drawing angles and calculating missing angles in a triangle, quadrilateral, on a straight line and about a point.

Today we had our usual Friday English and maths sessions and, this afternoon, we did some RE about pilgrimage, again as preparation for our visit on Monday. This should be a very good day. Please remember: we are wearing school uniform; packed lunch should be in a disposable bag and snack (if you wish to bring one) should be in your coat pocket.

We have begun new units of work in English, maths and geography as we begin our new half term.

Our English focus is on "argument" and "discussion" texts. We are learning how to organise and phrase convincing arguments on paper - first, by studying these kinds of texts to think about how different points are presented and the kinds of connectives writers use to build their argument and the sorts of persuasive language they use. We will be using the skills we learn in a week or so to write some argument/discussion texts related to our new geography topic which is all about planning proposals in the local area. (We have begun this topic by finding maps and pictures of our area on the internet using Google Maps and Windows Live Local.)

In maths, we have spent a couple of days revising and extending our skills on measuring and drawing angles and also using our knowledge of the properties of shape to calculate angles given only certain facts.

We have now broken up for our Spring half-term holiday. It doesn't seem long since Christmas - just five school weeks!

We have finished the testing for Assessment Week and spent our Friday English and maths lessons picking up on issues that were highlighted by the testing.

Yesterday, we finished our PE unit of work on gymnastics by performing the sequences of movement that we had devised and practised. Then we finished our technology project by testing to destruction the "Morrison-type" shelters we had made using paper, thin card and artstraws. We were amazed by the strength of these, with almost all being able to support weights of more than 25 kg. The strongest is still intact. It supported 80 kg and, for safety reasons we dared not go higher than this!

This afternoon, we had an enjoyable end to the half-term as a theatre group came to school to present a drama which taught and reinforced ideas about electricity in the Key Stage 2 curriculum.

School re-opens on Tuesday 19th February (Monday 18th February is an INSET day for the teachers).

Already we are in the last week before our half term holiday and this is Assessment Week for us so that we can get a good idea of the progress that has been made already this school year and what areas in different subjects need to be priorities between now and the the SATs tests and the end of the year.

As well has having a go at a couple of past SATs papers, we have also done some more writing in English (mainly sentence work) and calculator activities in maths. In ICT, we learned how to use text boxes in MS Word to annotate a World War 2 poster (also using arrows) which links in with our history topic. In addition, we did music yesterday afternoon and PE, French and PSHCE this afternoon.

We have continued our thinking about suspense stories in English, concentrating on planning this type of story and story plots before starting to write our own suspense stories on Thursday. In maths, we have focused on probability work, making sure that we understand the difference between evens and equal probability as well as being able to explain probabilities clearly.

We have begun a new unit of work in science. This is the chemistry section of this year's science curriculum and, after revising what we already know about materials and their properties, we have started to consider issues about dissolving. Yesterday, we planned an experiment to investigate factors which may affect the speed at which salt dissolves and today we carried out the practical work. Some of us investigated the effect of changing the temperature of the water, others investigated changing the amount of salt or speed of stirring.

We did netball-type games in PE and had our usual Friday English and maths lessons this morning.