MrJennings

This has been Book Week at school and we have had a number of special activities in connection with this.

We have had a performance from Footprints Theatre of the story How Georgie Radbourn Saved Baseball which was very well done and we had an author visit school. This was Nick Tozcek, who gave a presentation of performance poetry (and a little magic) to the whole school before working with each of the Year 5 and 6 classes. (Years 3 and 4 had drama workshops from Partake on Monday.) Mr Tozcek gave us some tips for collecting ideas and developing rhymes then, later, we had the chance to create our own poems in that style, aiming to develop strong rhythms and include plenty of rhymes. Today we had a Book Quiz in the hall with prizes for this (and a story writing competition) being handed out by our local Member of Parliament, Vernon Coaker. Almost all the children and staff came to school today dressed as book characters.

Another major piece of work for us this week was designing and making bookmarks to go with a particular book. The idea of these was that they contained some "extra" feature - something that opened or moved or "worked" in some way and we had some fantastic designs. Most of us also had time to create puppets or a board game to go with one of our favourite books.

We have now broken up for our summer half term holiday.
School re-opens on Monday 7th June.

This has been our main assessment week for the summer term with us completing our "Optional End of Year" tests in English and maths and these have taken up a little time each day.

In addition, we have continued with our English work on persuasive writing by looking forward to our Book Week next week and writing a radio advertisement for the Grandpa Chatterji book that we read together earlier in the term. Having complete some work on line graphs we did a little more about capacity and also thought about probability.

We have spent some time following up our work on childhood in ancient Athens, written about and  developed our "cam" mechanisms and had PE, music and science sessions.

A new piece of work for us this week has been our new RE topic. This is going to be about the work of Christian Aid and Islamic Relief. We have started by thinking about charities we have heard of and what they do and the idea that most charities are set up to change things in some way or another. We then considered what we might like to change and make better about the world in which we live.

The has been SATs week at school for our Year 6 pupils and, in Year 5, we have also begun our summer term tests in English. We have done a reading test, a spelling test and a short writing test. We have a few more tests to come next week. In our other English work this week, we have looked at writing persuasive letters. We used our learning from thinking about adverts and joined this with what we know about organising longer non-fiction texts.

Our maths has had two different foci. At the start of the week we did some measures work about capacity - estmating capacities and converting litres to millilitres. Then we moved on to drawing and interpreting line graphs, including graphs which "tell a story", for example the story of a journey.

We followed up last week's science planning by monitoring the seeds we had planted. We finished this off today by recording our final results which showed that all the seeds germinated except those which either had no water or those which had been kept in the fridge (i.e. with no warmth).

In history, we thought about the lives of boys and girls in ancient Athens and we have also take our technology project another step forward. This week we have been investigating simple cam mechanisms. We used a card wheel and a lollystick as a cam follower to make a mechanism which rises up and drops down with the cam.

This has been a short week at school with the Bank Holiday on Monday.

We have started a new unit of work in English which is all about persuasive writing. We started our studies by examining some magazine advertisements. Using these we thought about the vocabulary and language techniques used by the writers and the ways that the writers address the readers of the adverts. Later in the week we wrote adverts of our own trying to include the sorts of language we had identified. We have also done some work identifying statements of opinion and fact in adverts and other forms of writing.

One of our main areas of work this week has been setting up a science investigation to find out the conditions needed for seeds to germinate. We explored what we know about planning fair tests and then thought about the conditions that seeds normally have for germination. Different groups of children then wrote plans for an experiments to investigate different variables that might be important in germination. We have now set up these tests and are checking the seeds every day to see which conditions encourage most successful germination.

Our maths work on decimals and calculations has continued - we have spent most time on division and working towards long multiplication calculations this week. We have also had a couple of PE sessions, music and design technology. In technology we used card construction to make a device to help us investigate levers  including the effect on the output movement of altering the position of the pivot point (and how this can amplify  or reduce movement).