MrJennings

We have begun a unit of work on biography and autobiography in English. We began by reading a biography of Beatrix Potter and annotating the text to highlight the key features. We have read some other biography books and written some short biographies of famous people that we know. We started with six to ten facts about the person and put these into two or three really good sentences.

Our maths work has concentrated on further work on measurement (more conversions between measures) and data handling. We have drawn graphs, interpreted information presented in bar graphs and thought about how to group data when preparing to tally data and present it in charts and graphs.

We had another science afternoon on Wednesday, thinking about situations in which there are different forces acting on an object. We drew diagrams and made notes and then did a little review test on the work we have been doing in science this term.

For our history lesson this week, we thought about how the people of Nottingham were affected by World War 2. We looked at maps and charts to discover that Nottingham was bombed during the war and studied a leaflet distributed by Nottingham City Council informing the public who was entitled to be evacuated to a safe zone in the country.

We played football in PE on Thursday and finished the week with more time on our technology project.

We have now broken up for our autumn half-term holiday. School opens again on Monday 3rd November.

We have thought more about the World War 2 evacuation in history, watching and discussing a video which included first-hand recounts of the experience. We have also written letters, pretending that we were children who had been evacuated and were writing home to mum telling her what had happened on evacuation day and at our new homes.

In maths we have continued thinking about measurement and converting measures and we have also begun to think about data handling - revising the "range" and the "mode" of a set of data.

The week we have tried a couple of reading tests and had a science afternoon on Wednesday when we thought about the different forces acting on an object and also did an experiment to investigate the effect of changing the size of the rotor blades upon how long a spinner would stay in the air.

Today we also spent some more time on our design technology project, working to design and make the legs to support our strong structures.

Next week we have our parents' evenings.

In our new unit of work in maths, we have been thinking about measurement. We have done some activities which involve accurate measurement of length (to the nearest millimetre), converting measures from large units to smaller ones (e.g. km to m; m to cm; kg to g) and doing calculations involving measures.

In English we have written another story, trying to include all the sorts of features that we thought about earlier in the term and today we did a short reading test.

In the ICT room yesterday, we used Microsoft Word to annotate a World War 2 poster. The ICT skill we were learning and practicing was to use text boxes. We used these to place comments about the poster on the page and we also used arrows to indicate the part of the poster that the comment refers to.

We have also done some music based on African rhythms (including some dance), French, PSHCE and PE.

We had an excellent harvest service on Wednesday and all the different year groups offered interesting, well presented contributions. We had a special history activity in the afternoon when a suitcase "from the past" was discovered. We tried to work as historians and archeologists to examine the case and each item in it to work out who owned the case. Everyone really participated well and enjoyed the challenge, moving from evidence through hypothesis to conclusion. Also this week, we have looked at photographs and first-hand accounts of the evacuation in World War 2 to discover what these can tell us about the events of evacuation day and how it felt for those affected.

In maths, we have had a series of lessons and activities about number sequences. This has mainly focused on writing the "rule" by which the sequence is extended. We have tried to do this in three ways - to describe the sequence, to write the operation by which the next number is found and also to write this as a formula.

We have continued thinking about figurative language in English, mostly in the context of poetry. Today we did some more work on personification - analysing poets' use of personification through simile and metaphor.

We finished the week with some design technology work for our topic on shelters.

We have continued our poetry work in English by studying a series of poems in which the poet has used figurative language. As well as simile and metaphor, we have thought about personification. We have identified and discussed examples of personification and thought about how we could use this in our own poetry and prose writing.

In maths, we have been doing some measurement work - measuring to the nearest millimetre - and spotting patterns in the measurements we obtained. Today we had our usual Tuesday sessions of French, PSHCE and PE with the YMCA.

Our Harvest Festival service takes place tomorrow and we have been preparing for our part in this. Year 6 are doing the story of Ebenezer Squander - with the Ghosts of Harvest Past, Harvest Present and Harvest Future!

In addition to finishing our stories, we have done some more poetry work in English, using a word processor to draft, edit, improve and present our poems. The theme for our poems was Autumn and we used particular patterns of words to create the lines for the whole poem. For most of us these were adjective, adjective noun or adverb verb noun poems. Some also managed to type-up their simile poems about their friends.

In maths, we played some games using our knowledge of the properties of shape and then worked on finding and calculating perimeters of shapes. This has included working out formulae to give the perimeter of various shapes.

On Wednesday afternoon we did some science work on forces, writing up some of the practical activities that we have done and considering some of the ideas underlying the effects we have noted (including the finding that things weigh less in water).

Yesterday afternoon, some of us had a swimming lesson while others helped to make some props for the play we are getting ready for our school Harvest Festival Service next week.

Today was an INSET day for the teachers, so the children had a day off.