MrJennings

We have continued our work on multiplication in maths, mixing mental and written methods with some calculator work., We have also spent some time taking maths problems presented in words.

As well as having furthyer time to work on our Mr Men stories (some of these are finished now), we have done some futher work on instruction writing. We have sequenced instructions, thought about good connectives to introduce instruction statements and written introduction sections for instructions. In these introductions, we have tried to use a variety of sentences types to add variety to our writing.

In the last two days, everyone has finished making their weaving frame, gluing all the pieces together in an accurate, rectangular shape ready for threading up. We have also had PE (more gymnastics, creating sequences of well-linked balance and roll movements) and singing.

Although we haven't quite finished our Mr Men stories, we have begun a new unit of work in English. This is a non-fiction unit about instruction writing. We started off yesterday by looking at a good instruction text and highlighting and making notes about the important features.

In maths our work has been about multiplication and we have been involved in thinking about mental and written methods of multiplication including, today, starting to work on multiplying decimal numbers.

We have made further progress with our design technology project and most of us have now completed the preparation of the pieces which we will use to make our weaving frames. Yesterday we marked out and then sawed the little notches that will keep the warp threads in place when we are actually doing the weaving.

Today we also had our French lesson and PE.

We have spent some more time on our Mr Men stories in English and also worked on conjunctions and other connectives. In this work, we have been using conjunctions and other connectives to link ideas in sentences and to write these in different ways (i.e. with the connective in the middle or at the start of sentences and with the main clause first or second in the sentence). In maths, we have been consolidating the work introduced earlier in the week and last week.

We have done some further work understanding the settlement of Nottingham and the how this changed the area by drawing pictures and maps and we have also done some more technology, with a series of measuring and marking activities.

We have also had a PE lesson (gymnastics activities with the focus on balances) and singing. In our singing session today, we learned how to "sign" the first verse of Silent Night.

We have done a variety of activities in English so far this week. On Monday we did some poetry work, first thinking about text which could be regarded as a poem or a piece of prose and discussing what we thought, then looking at a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. after studying this, we answered some comprehension questions about the poem and vacabulary. Yesterday we wrote a story which will be assessed using SATs-type criteria and today we continued improving and writing up our Mr Men stories.

In maths we have been thinking about mental calculations - particularly multiplication - and also done some work on factors. As well as this we have kept revising our fractions work from last week.

In RE today we recalled our learning about the 5Ks of the Sikh faith and their purpose in reminding the wearers of important things about God and how they should live. Then we thought about what was important to us and what we could wear to remind us of these important things and/or how we should behave.

We had our usual Tuesday sessions of PE and French yesterday.

In maths we have turned our attention to percentages, relating these to fractions and today we also did some calculations using fractions - so we are beginning to relate fractions to division. We have again continued with our Mr Men stories and most of us have begun the task of copying these up.

We have found plenty of time in the last few days to listen to our current story book which is "Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing" by Judy Blume and have enjoyed discussing the issues that this raises.

We did some gymnastics in our PE session yesterday and, today, we finished off our week by doing some technology. We will be doing weaving and, in this lesson, we measured, marked and sawed the wood with which we will construct our weaving frames.

In English, we have been continuing with writing our Mr Men stories. We have also done some activities on descriptive writing while, in maths, we have moved on to a new unit of work thinking about fractions and percentages.

We have moved on a hundred years or so in our local history topic to begin thinking about why some villages in Saxon times grew to become towns while others stayed small settlements. To help our thinking we are learning about the important roll of markets, merhants and trading in determining which places became towns in those days.

We have had French and PE and another singing practice for our Christmas concert.

In English, we have continued to work on story structure and story planning. We have planned a Mr Men story using the structure we worked our and developed this by adding details and examples. Yesterday we wrote the opening and first episode of our stories and today we edited these a little with our partners. We also did some work on plural words.

We have been thinking about the properties of 2D shapes in maths and have been trying to learn the names of the shapes and to recognise them. We have focused on different quadrilaterals and polygons.

We have begun our history topic which will be an important part of our curriculum this term. This is a local history topic and is all about the city in which we live. We started off by revising what we learned about Saxons in Year 3 and then thought about what kind of place the Saxons would look for if they wanted to find a new place to establish a village and then we did a problem solving exercise to find such a place. The reason we did this is because Nottingham was first settled by a group of Saxon people in about 650 AD (or 650 CE). It is such a perfect site that all our groups chose the exact place that the Saxons picked all those hundreds of years ago.

After our half-term holiday, we have returned to some fiction work in English. We are tinking about story structure and have begun by looking at the plot of some Mr. Men books.

We have re-read some of the stories and analysed the plot - thinking about:

• opening
• build-up and events
• problem and/or climax
• resolution
• ending

We have also begun thinking about and talking through plots for new stories about "Mr. Men" type characters.

In maths, we have been learning about 3D shapes. We have made up 3D shapes (using cubes) from 2D pictures and, today, started thinking about the properties of different 3D shapes.

In ICT we have started using Windows MovieMaker to produce a music video (based on the song What a Wonderful World by Louis Armstrong) and in RE we drew pictures of artefacts - examples of the Sikh 5 Ks.

We have also had PE, had our first French lesson and had some story time.