MrJennings

We had a couple of special events to finish our Arts Week.

Yesterday, after doing some painting and reading some more of Kensuke's Kingdom (during which we tracked the voyage of the Peggy Sue using an atlas), we had the opportunity to do some African drumming using djembe drums and other traditional instruments. This was an excellent session which everyone enjoyed.

Today was International Day at school and we all had eight different activities during the day, each focusing on a different language or country of the world. There was a wide range of activities from dancing (including Italian folk dancing and Irish dancing), art and craft work (e.g. Polish paper cutting), quizes and using the computer to create a fact/picture montage about a particular country.

School has now broken up for its half-term holiday and re-opens on Monday 1st June.

In this last week of our half term , we are having Arts Week.

On Monday we had a visiting theatre group which presented the story of The Odyssey with stunning puppets, clever props and outstanding acting. We also began oor topic based on the Kensuke's Kingdom novel written by Michael Morpurgo. We read the start of the book together and made notes about the characters of the boy's parents and, since then, we have begun writing brief character studies of these people.

We have had another couple of music lessons with the tin whistle, learning the remaining main notes of the scale and their fingerings and then trying to play some more tunes and this afternoon we did an art activity, developing the sketching of figures by using chalks to create the person and then smudging the chalk to help suggest movement.

Yesterday, before we had our usual French, PSHCE and PE sessions in the afternoon, we made a proper start to our RE work on Buddhism. We watched a short video programme and read a booklet about the life of the Buddha and then completed some writing about his life, thought about the "four sights" and talked and wrote about he meaning underlying a story told about the Buddha and one of his followers.

SATs week has now finished! We did the Reading Test on Wednesday and maths tests yesterday and today.

Everyone tried hard and concentrated well and, overall, we quite enjoyed the week.

In between times we created a cartoon page, which many of us have now finished - and did some music lessons. We have been learning to play the tin whistle (reading music and learning the correct fingerings to play the notes. Yesterday, we did PE, playing Kabaddi (which means "holding of breath) is a kind of tag game that is popular in Asia. It's fun, but can be quite rough! We ended the week by doing a little more art. We were painting and tried something new by exploring some of the possibilities of using a chisel shaped brush.

Next week it is our Arts Week.

We have had the first two days of our SATs week and have had a very settled week so far with everyone really trying hard and approaching the tasks sensibly.

We had two science tests on Monday - we did one in the morning and one in the afternoon - and these went really well.

Today was "writing test" day. This morning we had the "long writing task" which was to write a report and, this afternoon, we did the short writing task, which involved writing a description, followed by the spelling test.

We finished the day by having our usual Tuesday PE session.

Tomorrow is the Reading Test.

Next week it is our SATs test week so we have been doing a number of activities in English, maths and science to make sure that we are properly prepared.

In English we have done some fiction and non-fiction writing, reminding ourselves to use a variety of sentence constructions in our work; good varied vocabulary and the appropriate style for the audience and purpose of the piece. We have also thought about the range of punctuation marks which we know about, practising these and doing some exercises on the punctuation of speech.

We have covered a wide range of different activities in maths this week, including data handling, shape work and calculations involving the use of calculators. We have also practised a range of mental calculation methods.

We watched a little more of the BBC ReviseWise science video and had a go at the second science test paper from last year's SATs tests. (We went through this together today.)

In addition, we had our usual Tuesday sessions of French, PSHCE and PE, we had a creative PE lesson yesterday and did some art to finish of the day today.

In English we have moved on to thinking about story writing. We did some revision about more advanced punctuation marks (including colons, semi-colons, brackets and dashes) and thought about the use of flash-backs in stories.

We did some more data handling work in maths yesterday, solving problems based on the interpretation of graphs and pie charts, before trying last year's mental maths test, which we then went through and discussed. Today we did some calculations using the calculator.

After finishing our unit on micro-organisms, we watched another section of the BBC science revision video yesterday and today and, in addition, we have had some time for PE (we played bench-ball in the hall because it was raining hard) and, today, we finished off the week with art. This time we were learning to draw people as part of the beginning of our unit of work entitled People in Action.

Monday is bank holiday so school reopens on Tuesday.