MrJennings

We have continued enjoying our Arts Week. On Wednesday our special activity was to begin a digital video project. Using a backing track of "What a Wonderful World" sung by Louis Armstrong, we have been using Windows Movie Maker to sequence a combination of still and moving images to produce a music video. In doing this, we have learned to add audio, picture and video images to the timeline and to edit video clips to the right length after selecting the part we want.

On Thursday we had a visit from the Road Safety team who did some activities to help us understand the distance it takes for cars to stop if the driver does an "emergency stop" and to think through a "road traffic accident analysis".

We have also been working in groups to produce a poster about a British mammal or insect. We did our research from books and the internet and then used pictures and diagrams from the internet and ones we drew ourselves together with paragraphs of writing to produce our posters.

School has now begun its summer half-term holiday. We re-open on Monday 2nd June.

This is our Arts Week at school and we have been doing some art-based activities over the last couple of days.

We have looked at some of Escher's work and thought about perspective and tessellation before producing our own versions of one of Escher's prints. We have also finished our water colour painting unit of work. We painted a landscape with trees, trying to ensure colours appeared natural, composing the picture well and showing depth using perspective and shadows.

This afternoon we also had our usual PE session with the YMCA and our French lesson. Instead of PSHCE, we discussed the work of Monet and some other impressionist painters.

We have now finished our SATs week and our external tests are complete. They seemed to go well and everyone certainly seemed to try hard and concentrate well.

In between the tests we have done some art and PE and next week, we are looking forward to our school Arts Week.

Yesterday we wrote a planned and wrote a short story to practice doing this in "test conditions" ready for next week. We tried to give the characters distinct personalities and use the good writing techniques that we have learned. Today in English we studied some poems and answered questions about the theme and author's choice of vocabulary and style.

We have been looking at some of the more challenging methods and processes in maths including long multiplication, explaining probabilities and pie chart data, multi-step problems and calculations involving percentages and fractions.

We have continued with our science revision and done some more water colour painting.

Next week is SATs week.

We have been doing some work on time problems and data handing in maths, checking on the work we did on finding the mean and median of frequency data that we thought about last week. In English we planned the writing for a series of tasks to help us quickly plan our ideas in the writing tests that we will be having next week and we also looked at some simple instruction writing and thought about how we could improve this in different ways.

Our science revision has focused on ideas about "Earth in space" and we have also done some more activities about micro-organisms in which we have discussed the implications of the fact that microbes are living things (needing water, air, food and warmth to grow well) upon ways we try to stop food "going off". We also had our usual Tuesday sessions of PE, French and PSHCE.

In English, we have continued thinking about formal styles of writing. We finished our "letter of complaint" to a restaurant manager yesterday and looked at different children's report writing today, using a mark scheme to identify strengths and weaknesses, rank the texts and give them marks.

We have done some more work on the mean, median and mode in maths, including finding these values for frequency data. (We found this quite hard.) We have also been through the maths test that we did on Monday.

In addition, we have spent some more time on science revision (mostly using a BBC video) and some quiz books, had a football session in PE and did some one-point perspective drawing in art.

We will not be at school on Monday because it is a Bank Holiday. School re-opens on Tuesday 6th May.