MrJennings

In our final week of the spring term we have had a number of special activities. We very much enjoyed watching the Year 3 and 4 classes presenting their production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat. Everyone did really well. We also had a visit to the Nottingham Royal Concert Hall. The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain were presenting a concert there and, during the afternoon, they offered a performance workshop to children of local schools. Our Year 5 were able to join about five hundred other school children, all bringing ukuleles, and we had a great time listening to the  Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain and joining in to play some pieces together.

At school, we completed our English work on explanation writing and started a new maths unit on number work and decimals. Having finished designing and making our bridges in technology, we finally managed to test them this week. We tested them to destruction across a 75 cm gap. Bridges were given points for design and for construction and were also weighed so that the strength to weight ratio of each bridge could be calculated. We also finished our unit of work in ICT which has been about controlling events. In our final activity we had to make a series of procedures to control an animated advertisement involving sound and movement.

We have used our history topic on the development of Nottingham as the focus for our explanation writing. We have been learning about the factors that influenced the growth of villages into towns in Saxon times and the significance of good communications in this. We found out that the presence of a good market was very influential in encouraging people to move into a settlement and that this, in turn, was dependent on travelling merchants visiting that particular market. Hence the importance of good road and river communications in those days.

In maths this week we have been doing a range of activities all connected with measurement. These have included naming angles and measuring angles with a protractor; calculating the area of rectangles; changing the units of measurement and rounding quantities.

We have had PE, including a football skills session, a French assessment and music (preparing for a ukulele concert) and finished the week with design technology. In this, we used the beams we made last week to create bridge platforms and some groups were able to start making the legs for their bridges. Next week will will test them for stability and strength.

This week we have begun a new English unit of work about explanation texts. We started by examining some explanation texts and considering the key features of the genre. We did a text marking activity and the used the children's version of the Highway Code (Arrive Alive) as the basis of some activities in which we had to link safety rules with reasons for them. We have also done some activities developing our understanding and use of connectives. We also started a new unit of work in maths. This has involved a range of different activities including coordinates, calculator work and trying long multiplication.

In design technology we have investigated stable structures further by making models (using plasticine and lolly sticks) and testing them on a tilting slope. We found that the wider the base created by the "legs", the more stable the models. Another important new start for us this week was our local history topic. Having looked at the daily life of ordinary people in Saxon times, and learned that Saxons in Germany suffered from land hunger, we worked in groups to decide the sort of place that Saxons would choose to build a new village. Then we found suitable locations and discovered that the place where Nottingham is now was an ideal site for Saxons.