MrJennings

Our main English work this week has been based around the types of characters found in ancient Greek myths and legends. We have read and discussed some different myths and legends and done a comprehension exercise on the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece. The written element of our work has focussed on writing descriptions of some of the mythical and legendary monsters, trying to structure our paragraphs well and use a range of sentence styles.

With the exception of a day thinking about probability, most of our maths work has been about graphs - bar graphs, bar line graphs and line graphs - and our work has involved drawing these different graphs and charts and interpreting them to find answers to questions.

On Wednesday and Thursday we worked on our ancient Greece history project, thinking about homes in that civilisation. After studying information about their houses, we completed a chart comparing them with modern homes. Then we looked at some archeological evidence of the earliest homes in Greece and worked in groups to develop theories to suggest how the design of these buildings developed over the centuries.

In addition to this work, we have has science, PE, music and art lessons.

We have continued our work on instruction writing in English. We have done further work on writing style (and making the opportunity to use question and exclamation sentences in introductions and final paragraphs) but the main piece of work for the week has been to write instructions for making a weaving frame. (This links with our recent technology project.)

At the beginning of the week our main maths activities concerned decimals and measurement. We have been practicing reading different types of scales and interpreting scales with missing values. We have also been rounding measurements to the nearest whole number and the nearest tenth of a unit. Today, we moved on to thinking about interpreting data and work on the "mode".

On Wednesday, we had another science afternoon, this time investigating mirrors (including curved mirrors) and lenses. We did a series of practical activities with this sort of equipment and recorded our observations to help us understand more about how light travels.

In addition, we had sessions of PE, music, and art, and some of us continued a piece of work we had begun before Christmas, researching clothes that were worn by the ancient Greeks.

The main focus for our English work this week has been instruction writing. We annotated a good example of an instruction text, identifying the key ways that the text was organised as well as the language features which are typical of this type of writing. We did some work on verbs and imperative verbs in particular and have written some instructions of our own. Today we concentrated on writing introductory paragraphs for a set of instructions to attract the reader's interest.

In maths we have continued our work on decimal numbers, doubling and halving decimal numbers, and also worked on maths problems presented in words. The problems have included ones which need a series of calculations to arrive at the answer.

On Wednesday we spent the afternoon on our ancient Greece topic thinking about the lives of children in ancient Athens. We worked out what our names would be if we had been named according to the formula that prevailed in those days and learned about how the lives of boys and girls were different from each other in ancient Athens.

We wrote up the science experiment that we did on shadows last week and had some time painting this afternoon.

We have had a short week to begin our Spring Term at school and have concentrated on our new science topic (about light and how we see) in addition to maths and English.

In science we have thought about an discussed how light travels and how we see. We learned about light sources (and that the moon and mirrors are not sources of light) and did some practical work to help us understand how mirrors work. Today we did an investigation about how shadows change and then a more formal experiment to find out how shadows change size as an object moves closer to the light source.

Our maths work this week has been about decimal numbers, revising ideas about place value and extending these to hundredths, and about mental methods of solving addition and subtraction calculations. We have looked at an extract of a story in English, doing some comprehension work on this, and writing a short story of our own.