MrJennings

In maths, we have moved on to a new unit which involves data handling work. We have revised ideas about tallying and creating bar charts and learned about the mode so that we can find the mode of a set of data. We have done a series of little maths experiments to produce some data and used these data sets to produce properly labelled graphs and find the mode - today this involved a board game and balancing centimetre cubes on our hands!

We have begun a new section of work in our topic on Rivers and Water. This concerns the water supply industry and how the water authorities obtain and clean the water that they then pipe into our homes. We have looked at a magazine ( called The Watermen) published a few years ago by the Severn Trent Water Authority and used this to help us find out about the way the company works.

We did some more work on our story openings in English yesterday, ensuring that we had all written an action opening, a descriptive opening and a speech/dialogue opening to Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Today we focused more specifically on writing good sentences - thinking about adding details to sentences to help give the reader a good, clear picture of what we are writing about.

We did some more of our comprehension work in English yesterday before moving on to think about story openings today. Developing the work on building characters, we thought about story openings in terms of whether they were mainly action openings, dialogue openings or descriptive openings.

Our maths work has mixed mental and written addition and subtraction calculations. In our mental work we have been adding or subtracting two-digit numbers (by partitioning the second number only).

Yesterday we learned about some planets in our science lesson and then did PE while this afternoon we did some work on the water cycle, labeling a diagram and annotating it to show and explain the processes involved in the water cycle. We have also made some quite good progress with our class story - The Iron Man.

We started off the week with some ICT in connection with our work on Water. We looked at the WaterAid website to think about the problems of people in less developed countries who do not have an easy supply of clean water. Then we played a game on the site which required us to make and explain decisions that the local community could make which may help them to obtain a reliable supply of cleam water.

We have done some more work on decimal numbers in maths - ordering them and partitioning the numbers, while, in English, we have continued our work on characterisation in stories. We thought about the way the techniques Philip Ridley used to make Grandpa seem to be an unpleasant character (his actions, the things he said and the way he said them) and identified some examples of these. Today we wrote a section of a story using these techniques to make a character appear very nasty to the reader. We chose the character of Baby Bear in Goldilocks and the Three Bears, making him irritable, grumpy and unkind to his parents.

In maths we have done some more work on calculations - focusing on multiplication and division - and then we have started our first main maths unit of the year which has involved work on ordering numbers and thinking about place value - including place value in decimal numbers.

We have continued to base our English work on the Hooligan's Shampoo story. We have been thinking about the characters in the story (particularly Grandpa) and the way that the author made him unlikeable and then made him change at the end of the story.

On Tuesday afternoon, we did PE and also had the first of a series of lessons on our Earth in Space topic and our topic on Water and Rivers has got underway with a lesson in which we thought about the uses of water and the places we find water.

Our new school year has begun and our English work has been based on the story Dinner Ladies Don't Count by Bernard Ashley. We have listened to and discussed the chpaters of the story and thought about the characters portrayed, some of the language used and the story structure as well as the elements of the plot. We have also used this text as the basis of our written English - we have written an episode before the opening of the book and done some autobiographical writing. We also did some maths today - mostly addition and subtraction sums.