MrJennings

We have finished the last week before our half term holidays and we now have a week's break.

We have done some more poetry - writing concrete poems about our own choice of themes and, today, looked at some children's short stories (Mr. Men stories) which we are going to use to help us think about story plots at the beginning of next half term. In maths we spent a little time on number sequences and also did some more revision of work that we have covered previously this term.

In science on Wednesday, we used Logit Explorers and temperature probes to record what happens to the temperature of water as it is brought to the boil (i.e. that the temperature increases but does not go over 100° C). We also used the sensing device and probe to record the temperature of water into which some ice had been placed. It took over six hours for the temperature of the liquid to come to within a degree of room temperature.

This afternoon we finished our week with painting - and we completed our picture of summer trees and these will be displayed in the corridor soon.

I hope everyone has a good holiday - school reopens on Monday 2nd November.

We are taking a bit of a break from our non-fiction writing to do some poetry this week. We have started, unusually, by writing some poems. We have written on the theme of Autumn (yesterday) and The Playground (today). We have not been using structures with rhythm or with rhyme, but finding other ways to pattern the language.

In maths we have done a little more on factors, but have mainly been thinking about multiples and common multiples - and presenting our answers in various ways including suing Venn diagrams. Our ICT has also had something of a mathematical theme this week as we learned how to use a spreadsheet (MS Excel) to produce different sorts of graphs from one and two sets of data.

We had the last of our science lessons about the Earth in space today, including a little review test, as well as our Tuesday PE lesson and we have also finished reading The Iron Man together. This was very popular.

We had a special History Day yesterday in which everyone had lessons with different teachers. The focus of the day was different aspects of  history during Stuart times and lessons were about the plague, the Great Fire of London and the Gunpowder Plot. We did lots of different things including drama, story-telling and craft activities to help us learn about this period.

Today we completed our geography report about "the life of a river" by writing a paragraph about the lower course of a river after we had together written about the middle course. After that we did a maths test which covered all the different areas of the subject that we have done this term.

In the afternoon we did our tables test and our regular admin (giving out letters, homework and completing our target slips) and we finished the day with some more painting - this time we were painting summer trees.

Our calculations work in maths has moved on to thinking about addition and subtraction calculations, concentrating on written calculations. Today's maths has been about factors and finding factors of numbers - we also discussed compliments and multiples to try and avoid confusion and build knowledge of mathematical language.

Our work on non-fiction writing has continued. We have done a little work on writing sentences in different ways (including starting sentences with verbs, adverbs and connectives and have written short paragraphs about the upper course of rivers. We also did a reading test on Monday morning.

In ICT we did a little more on our spreadsheets work and, in science, we have been learning about condensation. We made observations as water was being heated on a cooker, noting the steam rising and that the level of water in the pan gradually going down. A cold metal tray was placed in the steam so that we could see water condensing on the cold surface and even drips formed to create "rain".

As well as these activities, we did PE yesterday, science about shadows and, today, finished the afternoon with some sketching and a story.

After continuing with our non-fiction work yesterday, we took a break today to write a story, revising some of the work that we did earlier on in the term. We have also stated a new maths unit (which focuses on number and calculations) by working on some mental multiplication calculations such as 30 x 500 and 90 x 60.

We did benchball (a netball-type game) in PE yesterday followed by some more RE. This lesson was the first of a couple about the Five Ks which are so important to people of the Sikh faith. We watched a video clip and then sorted a collection of cards with different pieces of information about each of the 5 Ks to help us complete a sheet linking the picture, name and significance of each symbol.

Today, after English and maths we did our tables test, checked our target sheets and then did some water colour painting before finishing off the day with a story.

We have been busy preparing for our Harvest Festival presentation this week. The theme of our section was "Water" and we wrote new words to some well-known ABBA songs to sing as part of this. We practiced with the other Year 5 class on Monday, had a dress rehearsal yesterday (we loved dressing up in '70s style things) and did the performance today. It did go very well.

Our English work continues to be about writing good clear non-fiction paragraphs (our latest one was about the sources of rivers) but our maths has moved on to a short series of lessons about measurement. We have been measuring and drawing lines to the nearest millimetre and converting between different measures of length (e.g. km to m, m to cm, cm to mm and vice versa).

We have also done science and PE and started our new RE topic about the Sikh faith by thinking about uniforms and badges and why people wear these.

We have continued our work on non-fiction writing in English this week. Our focus has been writing paragraphs for non-chronological reports and the structure of individual paragraphs in particular. We have been working on writing good, clear opening sentences to communicate the main ideas of the paragraph and then adding following sentences to give details and examples, trying to make sure that we use a variety of sentence structures for these to help keep the reader's interest.

Our work on data handling in maths has concluded for the time being. Our work has covered bar charts, bar line charts and pictograms. As well as drawing these graphs, we have been interpreting information from graphs and tables (which proved quite a challenge sometimes) and we have been finding the mode of different sets of data.

Our Water and Rivers topic has progressed, partly through our English work (as we have been doing out report writing about different rivers across the world) and in science. We did a series of experiments to try to find out the different factors which affect the speed with which water evaporates. We found that our hand dryer in school was the best followed by a position on a radiator where the wet material was also fanned and we discussed explanations for our findings.

In addition to these major areas of work, we have had a couple of PE sessions, done some more with our tin whistles and started practising for our part in the school harvest service next week.