MrJennings

During the last week of term, we have had a focus on mental maths skills and also done some maths investigations with a Christmas theme. We have done some English work, continuing our focus on paragraph writing, this time concentrating on descriptive paragraphs based on the characters created by Ricky Gervase in his Flanimals books. In science, we had a "light" activity afternoon, investigating the ways in which light changes direction using mirrors, including concave and convex mirrors and different lenses. We have also had time to make Christmas cards - some origami cards and some sewn Christmas card designs - and some of us have made calenders too.

On Wednesday, we had our Christmas party (games and dancing in the hall with the other Year 5 and 6 children) followed by tea in the dining hall. Then, yesterday most of us went with the choir to do some carol singing to the residents of St. Andrew's House. Today we had a special assembly with Footprints drama group.

We have now broken up for our Christmas holiday. School re-opens on Monday 5th January.

We have had a busy, but happy, week with our pantomime performances which all went very well indeed.

We have continued our non-chronological writing in English and geography in relation to our topic on mountains. We have also written a science report to write up our science experiment in which we investigated shadows. In maths, we tried an old SATs paper on Monday and then began a new unit of work focusing on decimal numbers, understanding place value, estimating and rounding. We have finished off some of our RE work on menorah and made notes about paintings of the annunciation and nativity in the Christian tradition, noting the use and meanings of religious symbolism employed by the artists. We have also done some art this week, sketching more still life pictures.

In a busy week in which we have spent some time preparing for our Christmas production next week, we have continued to work on our non-chronological writing in English. We have revised and improved paragraphs about plants in mountain environments and thought more about the features of well-organised paragraphs. Our maths work has focused on relating percentages to fractions and fractions to division. This has enabled us to calculate fractions and percentages of numbers and quantities.

In addition to this we have done some more of our project on symbols in different religious faiths by completing representations of Ganesha using ideas from Hindu iconography and making notes about this. In one of our PE lessons we did gymnastics. We are coming towards the end of this unit of work and created sequences of movements involving rolls, balances and series of jump steps, making sure that the moves were neatly linked and any turns were smartly executed.