MrJennings

This has been something of a disrupted week at school which some of the children spending a day or part of a day at the secondary school where they will begin next September.

We have read and discussed some more of the Kensuke's Kingdom novel and made some notes about the character of Kensuke as Michael perceives him upon first meeting. We have spent a lot of time on our Fairground rides technology topic. Everyone has finished the main planning work and is well on with the making. In addition, we have done some maths, some history about Aztec painting and some research about Aztec food or weapons and armour. In PE we did cricket and rounders.

Today has been an INSET day for the teachers. School re-opens on Monday.

On Thursday we wrote an account of the experience of being in a storm at sea. We imagined that we were Michael (from Kensuke's Kingdom) and used the notes that we had made the day before to write a dramatic description including some figurative language (and, if possible, some personification).

We had two lessons of Design Technology. In the first, we developed our chosen fairground ride design and later made a version of these using K'NEX. These prototypes helped us to ensure that our designs would actually work. We photographed these models before dismantling them. We finished the day with a music lesson.

Following our Summer Fair last Saturday, we helped our Infant School with their Summer Fair today! We helped run the games and some of the stalls.

In class we have had PE (twice), playing rounders on Monday and practicing our throwing and catching. We have continued with the making of our music video in ICT, editing and inserting clips from the videos that we filmed last week. We have also continued planning our fairground rides in DT, drawing a series of possible designs before we select the best one.

In English we have begun a unit of work on writing dramatic descriptions. Our main writing will be a description of a storm affecting the Peggy Sue - the boat in Kensuke's Kingdom. We studied a good description from The Wind in the Willows and then listened to sound effects of a storm and watched videos of a ship being battered by storm conditions. Then we made some notes ready for our writing after discussing ways of using figurative language to enhance our descriptions.

We have finished preparing our games for tomorrow's Summer Fair at school and tested them this afternoon.

We have also done some more RE. We watched a video programme about the life of a boy growing up in a Buddhist monastery and the wrote a letter to him explaining how the ordinary daily life of a child in the UK is different from his.

In history we have concluded our work about Aztec homes by looking at the changes in house design as the civilisation developed and across social classes. By comparing the designs we developed some hypotheses about how designs may have evolved.

One of our major pieces of work this week is to plan, make, advertise and get ready run our games for the Summer Fair at school this weekend. These are fairly well underway now and we have also had time to read some more Kensuke's Kingdom (tracking the voyage of the Peggy Sue around the world), maths investigations, French and PE.

In ICT we learned how to record video on digital cameras and then filmed sequences ready to insert into our Wonderful World music videos. Our history focus has been a study of Aztec homes. After learning about the different sorts of homes there were in Aztec times, we have compared different types, contrasted these with our own homes and begun to think about how their designs evolved.

We have finished, improved and copied up our character studies in English and begun our new RE topic about Buddhism. So far we have learned about the life of the Buddha and produced a summary of his life-story. We have also thought about the spiritual meaning behind one of the stories told about the Buddha.

We have done some more maths investigations, including ones based on finding permutations and combinations and ones about shape, and this afternoon we planned and carried out some complete science investigations.

In PE we had the apparatus out in the hall, focusing on balance and control.

At the beginning of our new half term, we have begun several new units of work.

In English, we have started an extended topic based on the novel Kensuke's Kingdom by Michael Morpurgo. We have read the first chapter, done some note-taking exercises and begun writing a character study of Michael's mother or father. We have been doing some investigations in maths based on number patterns.

The Aztec civilisation is the focus of our history work this term. We started off by studying an artist's impression of life in an Aztec village before learning about early Aztec history and their written language.

In addition to these major pieces of work, we have had PE, French and done some Design Technology work, concentrating on evaluating products.