MrJennings

We have been enjoying Book and Activity Week at school this week.

This ended today, as we broke up for half-term holidays, with a day when everyone dressed up as a book character. Lots of people made a fantastic effort with costumes. We also shared a book quiz in the hall for the whole school this morning with rounds on Traditional Tales, Mr. Men books, the stories of Roald Dahl and an observation/listening round. At the end of the quiz there were little prizes for the winning team and also prizes for the children who won our Book Week story writing competition. This afternoon we watched a video of the story entitled Five Children and It with our other Year 5 class.

Earlier in the week we had a range of activities related to books. We did a full design technology project on bookmarks. We examined a collection of bookmarks and identified the key features as well as features that made individual bookmarks special. We then designed our own bookmarks specifically to match an individual book. After making the bookmarks, we evaluated them against our design criteria and also thought about the way we had approached the task.

We have also made our own version of book covers. We chose to do this either for The Iron Man or for Stig of the Dump, both of which have been class books this year. We thought carefully about what information should be presented, how to make the lettering good and how to make a strong illustration.

This has been a test week at school. We have had our main English and maths tests this week (with test papers on reading, writing and spelling; maths - with and without a calculator - and mental maths). In addition, we have had time for a little more work on persuasive writing and some maths lessons about probability.

Our other main area of work this week has been on our Sikhism RE topic. We have watched some video programmes introducing some key ideas about the Sikh faith and researched some key facts. We have thought about the importance of the Mool Mantar to Sikhs and compared and reflected on different translations of this. We have also investigated the "5Ks". We did this by examining objects that represent these 5Ks, drawing them  and by classifying pieces of information about them.

We have completed our work on vector graphics in ICT and we finished the week with doing some pottery. We used air drying clay to produce thumb pots. We will paint these in a couple of weeks time with the designs we are creating in the style of Bodil Manz. (We also had time to create some clay tiles, investigating different ways of marking clay and joining one piece of clay to another.)

Next week is Book and Activity Week at school.

We have continued our work on persuasive writing in English this week. We have thought about planning texts like this and designing paragraphs before writing them in sentences. We have also looked at phrases which help make texts like this sound convincing and be more likely to be persuasive. In addition, we have done some comprehension work. Our maths has focussed on drawing and interpreting graphs. We have done some work on bar charts but have focussed on line graphs this week. We have plotted data, making sure that we can plot intermediary points, and have used the graphs to find answers to questions.

We started a unit of work on vector graphics in ICT, thinking about how this type of image is different from "painting" style applications. We investigated layering elements of pictures, moving and resizing elements and grouping these too. Our history work this week has involved thinking about Nottingham Castle and the changes that took place on that site. We studied pictures of the castle representing the design of the castle at different points in its history and we put these in chronological order. We identified the structural developments and then learned about some of the personalities, including royalty, who have been significant in the life of the castle.

We finished the week with some art. This is our project on containers. Later we will be making play pots to decorate, but today we started by examining the work of a range of artists who have produced containers (mostly potters and ceramicists). We discussed and compared their work, trying to spot characteristics of the different artists. We then looked in more detail at the work of Bodil Manz. Pieces of her ceramic work were compared and the repeated elements of her style were discussed. We then began to make our own designs in the style of Bodil Manz, trying to develop a set of designs which have a clear relationship between them.

In English we have started a unit of work on persuasive texts. This builds on our previous unit on explanation texts and we are now exploring how we can add features to make a text into a persuasive argument. Our maths has focussed on calculations - mainly mental methods of multiplication (e.g. 30 x 6000) and written methods of division. We have also been trying some mental maths questions every day.

In history, we have been investigating whether the Vikings came to the Nottingham area. We did this by learning about Saxon and Viking place names and then studying OS maps of the area and classifying the place names according to their likely origin. This showed us that there was good place-name evidence for Viking settlement and we then learned about the history of the Vikings in and around Nottingham - and other changes that took place near Nottingham in that period.

We have started a science unit on life cycles, which is mostly about the life cycle of plants, and did some art. We used a large chisel brush with water-colour paints, investigating some of the effects that can be obtained by different brush strokes and then tried to use these to reproduce a stylised still-life picture of a pot plant.