MrJennings

We have continued our work on different poetic forms by studying and writing Clerihews and then we improved, corrected and typed up our best/favourite poems that we wrote during the week for our folders and ready for a display. Our maths work moved on to looking at translations of shapes yesterday while today we looked back at the calculator maths test that we did just before our half term holiday.

Yesterday afternoon we had the apparatus out in PE. We were able to work in seven groups on the different apparatus and to try activities at different heights. This afternoon we continued with our painting work. Today we painted trees, thinking about the shape of canopies, the proportion of canopy to trunk, the colour of tree trunks and practising a range of brush strokes.

After missing a day of school on Monday (because of an INSET day for the teachers) we had our usual Tuesday sessions of French, PSHCE and PE in the yesterday afternoon. While this was going on a few of us went to the Wheldon School for an athletics competition against other local schools. We did a series of running, jumping and throwing events and managed to win a closely fought event to earn a place in the area finals.

Yesterday morning we began a new unit of maths work about measurement. We revised ideas about place value and rounding numbers using measurement data and then practised decimal addition and subtraction involving weights and also did some long multiplication. Today's maths moved on to problem soving activities, again based on weight number and requiring conversion of weights from one unit to another (e.g. grams to kilograms).

We have also begun a new unit of work in English this week as we have turned our attention to poetry again. This time our study is focussing on different forms of poetry - so far we have looked at Limericks and Haiku. We also had a writing afternoon today. Thinking back to the leaflet we wrote at the end of last half term, we looked at samples of writing done by other children and tried to evaluate these pieces of work. Then we looked at a mark scheme written for this task before thinking about our own piece of writing again which we then began improving.

We have now broken up for our half-term holiday.

In the last couple of days we have spent some time in maths working on probability activities and doing some data handling work involving pie charts. We finished off (and some of us copied up) our suspense stories in English and we also completed our cricket skills unit of work in PE.

Our science this week was concerned with separating materials and we thought about different ways of separating materials (including sieving, filtering, evaporation, mixing with water and using magnetism) and the types of mixtures that could be separated using each method.

Today we had our Friday English and maths groups (in maths we looked at the SATs papers we had tried earlier this week) and this afternoon, after the necessary admin, we painted again. This time we used water colour washes to create the back ground for landscape painting which we will complete after our half term holiday.

We been finishing off our mid-year assessment activities this week, doing a SATs-type reading test and maths test this week. We have also already gone through the reading test picking out some key learning points to help us with similar tasks in the future.

In addition, we have tried to finish off the suspense stories that we have been writing and had two music lessons (as we missed out last week because of the weather). We had our usual Tuesday sessions of French, PSHCE and PE and today we finally managed to finish of the book we have been enjoying as a class.

It has been a snowy week around school. We managed to stay open on Monday and Tuesday (when a number of schools in our area were forced to close) but the conditions on Thursday made it too dangerous to expect people to try to come and even our school did not open. On Monday and Tuesday we had lots of fun on the playground with the snow.

It was due to be our mid-year assessment week this week and, despite the weather and school closure, we have managed to complete some of our tests.

We did some more suspense story writing in English - creating the opening and build-up sections of a story and trying to vary the viewpoint, that is, telling different parts of the story from different characters' points of view. The focus of our maths work has been data handling and work on finding the mean, median, mode and range of sets of data. Our science work this week involved some practical work on evaporation in which we heated some salt water to recover the salt and to condense a little of the steam to get back some of the water.

We finished the week with our usual Friday English and maths sessions and some water colour painting.