MrJennings

This week we have done a little more formal writing in English. This was related to our work in science on microbes. We looked at an "informal" e-mail including some warnings about barbecuing meet and used this to devise some "rules" for good practice when cooking meat on a barbecue. Then we wrote some guidance for purchasers of a new barbecue - and we did this in a formal style (e.g. using passive verbs, technical terms, no slang, etc.).

In maths we have being doing some data handling. We have created and used conversion graphs and pie charts to solve problems. We watched a science video this afternoon, produced by BBC ReviseWise and have been devising a science experiment. We also spent some more time on our "Wonderful World" music video on Monday morning and had our Tuesday French, PSHCE and PE sessions yesterday.

In English, we have begun to think about formal and informal styles of writing. We have looked at two letters of complaint (about the same incident) written in contrasting styles and also compared formal and informal invitations to an event, noting the ways that the same information can be conveyed indifferent ways. We have also thought about the kinds of phrases that can be found in more impersonal texts and formal writing as well as considering sentences written in the passive form.

We tried the calculator paper of last year's maths SATs test on Wednesday before moving on to think about problems involving shape patterns yesterday. These also helped us revise some algebra work. Today in Friday maths we went through this paper. We also had our usual Friday English session today.

Learning more about microbes, and the fact that they are living things, has been the focus of our science work. We investigated the effects of different growing conditions on yeast and made some notes about this. We have also related our knowledge about these growing conditions to the ways we store food to stop it decaying quickly (e.g. putting it in the fridge, canning it, etc.)

In addition to this, we had PE on Thursday (doing some tennis activities) and did some ICT (recording some video on digital cameras) today. We finished off with some story time.

An OFSTED inspector is visiting our school on Monday.

Our new term has started and we have begun new units of work in English and maths.

In English we have started off with some descriptive writing activities, creating short paragraphs to describe a range of situations, making sure that we use good expanded noun phrases and connectives whilst also trying to use a range of sentence types and different sentence structures.

Our maths work has focused on shape as we have revised the names of 2D and 3D shapes and thought about their properties, particularly parallel and perpendicular sides and faces, but also revising angle and symmetry properties.

In addition, we had our usual Tuesday sessions of French, PSHCE and PE today and have tried some more of the BBC ReviseWise science activities. Both yesterday and today we also spent some time going through some questions on last year's Reading Test that we tried at the very end of last term.

In English we did some more work on writing a discussion text about the issue of whether an hotel should be allowed to build a water sports centre in a quiet Lake District village. We concentrated on building good paragraphs with a clear opening sentence and supporting detail. Today we did a comprehension exercise.

In maths we did a practice maths SATs test on Wednesday (which we reviewed in maths today) while, on Thursday, we did some harder division calculations and checked up again on the kinds of multiplication sums we did on Tuesday.

On Thursday afternoon we had a visit to "Safety Zone" where we had eight different activities each teaching us about and testing our knowledge of issues connected with keeping ourselves (and others) safe. These included input from St. John's Ambulance Brigade, the police, EON electricity, Severn Trent Water Authority, Trading Standards and road safety officers. It was an excellent event.

We finished the week off with some more landscape painting and now we have two week's holiday. School re-opens on 20th April.