MrJennings

We had a special afternoon yesterday when we had a "National Park Planning Authority" meeting. All the desks were moved ready to create a large square ready for the meeting and everyone received papers. The debate/discussion was about the request from the owners of a hotel to build a lake-side water sports centre. Some people were the hoteliers and they had to speak about their plans. Other people were local sheep farmers, shopkeepers and residents who spoke about their objections and other opinions, while some of us were the representatives of Activity Holidays (organisers of holidays for 16-25 year olds) or Saga Holidays (organisers of holidays for older people. We had a very good discussion and, eventually, the voting gave permission for the construction of the sports centre but decided that speed boats would not be allowed because they would create too much disturbance. Today we followed up this by beginning to produce a written discussion based on these issues.

As well as this, we had another session on the BBC revisewise site and went through the science test that we did last week and today we did some more difficult mental multiplication calculations in maths and had our Tuesday French and PSHCE before watching the Year 3 and 4 production, Jack and the Beanstalk.

In English yesterday, we used our success criteria sheets to help us review the different pieces of writing we have done this week. Then we turned to yet another genre and wrote an advertisement for a piece of computer equipment, again trying to ensure that we use a good variety of sentences and punctuation. Today, in our Friday English groups, we looked at some poetry.

Maths has continued to focus mainly on calculations involving decimal numbers - especially multiplication and division - and we have revised long multiplication and tackled more difficult division sums. Today we also looked at some work on probability that we didn't manage to finish last week.

We have done some more work on food chains in science as well as thinking about aspects of a healthy diet, we played bench-ball in PE and, this afternoon, we completed some unfinished art work.

In maths, our work has focused on decimal numbers. We have revised rounding (to whole numbers, tenths and hundredths), ordered decimals (with different numbers of decimal places) and done addition and subtraction calculations.

We have been doing different kinds of writing in English this week. Each one has been a short task (one a play script, one an autobiographical episode and one a story introduction) but on each occasion, the main goal has been to write using a good range of effective sentences, correctly punctuated.

In science we have moved on to a new topic on living things, beginning with food chains, and have also done another science test - the second part of the one we did last week - and tried some of the BBC revisewise activities. We have also had our usual Tuesday sessions of French, PSHCE and PE.

We have had another busy week following our weekend away together at Caythorpe.

The special events were a school disco on Thursday evening and a science day in the middle of the week. On science day we had two main activities. One of these was a series of investigations and practical activities involving magnets. The other was a "CSI" styled activity in which we first had to do a series of tests on six white powders. The tests included describing appearance, texture and smell, then observing reaction of the material with water, noting its pH and finally checking its reaction with a weak acid. After that we did some chromatography on some felt pens found at "the suspects" homes. We used all this information to make a comparison with results of similar tests on substances found at the scene of crime and help the police arrest the most likely suspect. We also had time to make some records of our finger prints.

In our normal lessons this week, we took a break from our work on argument and discussion in English to write a playscript from a story following a lesson revising the key features of scripts. We continued our maths work on fractions and percentages by working on problems in these areas. We finished the week with an art lesson in which we made some card sculptures - hoping that some of these will be displayed in the new glass cabinets in the school entrance hall.

We have begun a new unit of work all about argument and discussion texts in English. We have annotated a good example of a discussion, highlighting the key organisation and language features and have spent some time thinking about how to plan the writing of a discussion. We did this by generating ideas, organising them and then planning a sequence of paragraphs. We have also drafted and improved a discussion about whether children should be allowed to have mobile phones in school.

In maths we finished some shape work and have begun a new series of lessons about fractions, decimals and percentages. We have worked on equivalent fractions, changed fractions to the same denominator in order to compare and order them, improper fractions and mixed numbers as well as finding some percentages.

We have come to the end of our science topic on materials by thinking more about separating mixtures of materials. We then reviewed the work we had done and checked up on some misunderstandings about evaporation by evaporating and condensing the water from a salt solution - noticing that the condensed water does not taste salty.

We had our Tuesday French, PSHCE and PE sessions, learned about how Muslim people use and treat the Qur'an and, on Friday, most of the Year 6 went away together for the weekend. We went to a PGL centre in Lincolnshire and had a fantastic time.

We have done some more poetry in English to finish our unit of work. This time we thought about kennings before returning to review and compare all the forms that we had looked at in the past week. Now we have moved on to a study of "discussion" texts.

In maths we have been working on angles - measuring and drawing angles with a protractor as well as estimating angles. This week's science involved practical work mixing different powders with water and weak acid while observing the effects. This is part of our work on reversible and irreversible reactions.

We began some RE work today in connection with our new topic on Holy Books. We watched a BBC program about the Qur'an and made some notes about what it is, what it is like and what Muslims believe about the Qur'an.