MrJennings

In the first week of this half term we have started thinking about the structure of short stories in our English work and have also studied and written some concrete poetry. We looked at the opening, build-up, climax, resolution and ending of some Mr. Men stories and have thought about planning some of our own. In writing concrete poetry, we have been thinking about the language we use. We have focussed on good quality description and, specifically, included simile.

Our maths this week has involved learning about shape. After revising the properties of some 2D shapes, we did an investigation about diagonals (and learned the mathematical definition of diagonals, which we felt was different from the way that we use the word in everyday life). Then we moved on the 3D shapes. Our work helped us to think about properties in term of vertices, edges and faces and we have also done some activities to help us relate the shapes to drawings (i.e. 2D representations) of these shapes.

The main focus for our science has been condensation. We set up some apparatus to heat water and used a temperature probe connected to the computer to record the temperature of the water. We noticed that the temperature rose rapidly until it approached 100° C. It then stayed steady at around that temperature. When a cold metal tray was held in the steam, we noticed droplets of water forming on it (condensation) and eventually this started dropping off the tray - rather like rain. We had made a sort of model of the water cycle.

We have begun three other pieces of work this week. We have started French with Mr Caldwell, we have measured and sawed the wood in preparation for making our weaving frames in technology and, this afternoon, we started learning the songs for our Christmas production.