MrJennings

We have started new units on work in several areas of the curriculum in this first week of our half term.

In English, we have begun thinking about explanatory texts and writing explanations. We have looked at some explanatory texts, including some from encyclopedias which explain phenomena or how things work.We have discussed the key features of explanation texts and marked these on an exemplar text. We have also worked on connectives in explanations and done some comprehension exercises to help us understand more about the organisation and layout of this sort of text.

We have been thinking about calculations and number patterns in maths. This has involved some problem solving as well as mental arithmetic, patterns in doubling and halving numbers, and sequences increasing and decreasing in steps of 25.

A significant area of work for the second half of the year is our new history unit about the civilisation of ancient Greece. We have started thinking about this by finding out about the position of modern-day Greece in the world and by doing a problem-solving exercise about early Greek history.

We finished the week by doing some RE work preparing for our Time Travelling visit to Southwell Minster in a couple of weeks.

In our final week of the half term we have completed our unit of work on myths and legends and begun a new unit in maths.

In English we have finished watching a series of videos telling the story of The Odyssey. We have considered the  features of myths and legends and compared and contrasted these genres. We have also written a new episode in the style of The Odyssey. The maths work has focused on number patterns and relationships between numbers. We investigated general rules of addition and subtraction of odd and even numbers and used knowledge of facts (such as 15+8=23) to quickly and easily find answers to calculations (e.g. 1500+800=?) involving larger numbers.

We have spend several lessons on our local history topic this week to draw this to a close. We have looked at maps of Nottingham to discover what can be learned from these. We found our that many of the roads appearing on a map produced in 1610 can still be seen today. We also found that the road names from 1610 (many of which have not changed) could tell us something about the activity that went on in that place in the middle ages. (We found where the fishermen, smiths, carters and wheelwrights worked. We found where the butchers had their properties and where the tanners and dyers plied their trades.)

We had science and two PE sessions and finished our water colour painting unit by painting flowers or a meadow of spring flowers.

We are now on our school half-term holiday and the teacher have a training day on Monday 22nd February.
School re-opens on Tuesday 23rd February.

We had a special day at school on Monday when we spent the day scripting and videoing a short animated film. Using a fable (The fox, the rooster and the dog) as our starting point, we first wrote the play script to tell the story. Then we created the main illustrations for the key characters and the backdrops for the scenes. The script was recorded using digital voices recorders and we used the visualiser as the camera and a program called Monkey Jam to create the stop-animation films. These were loaded into Windows MovieMaker to fit the animation to the soundtrack.

This has also been our assessment week at school . We have done some tests in English (reading, writing and spelling) and maths.

In history we thought about Nottingham Castle and how it changed and developed over the centuries since it was first built in 1068 and in geography we have done some mapwork focusing on rivers of the British Isles and the seas around us. We also did science, PE and art.