MrJennings

This week, we have begun new units of work in both English and maths.

In English, we have started thinking about writing good non-fiction paragraphs.We have used the context of our geography work on rivers to do this so, having read information about different major world rivers and made notes of the important information we found, we had a go at writing a paragraph about the River Volga. Having reflected on our writing, we have been working on increasing the variety of sentence structures we used in our writing to avoid starting a large number of them with a noun or pronoun. Today we started thinking about the use of a clear, simple sentence to be the first sentence of the paragraph to contain the most important idea and tell the reader clearly about what the paragraph is about. In our other geography work, we have spent some more time thinking about the water industry and how it ensures that we receive safe, clean water in our homes.

Our maths work has involved revising different ways of presenting data - including pictograms and bar charts - and we have learned about bar-line charts. We have done some mathematical experiments, crated tally charts to collect the data and then presented it in different ways. We have also kept practising our mental methods of adding and subtracting two-digit numbers.

In addition to these lessons, we have had another science lesson, another session with the ukulele, two sessions of PE and finished the week with art again. We have also started reading The Iron Man together.

Our main work in English this week has focussed on improving the way we develop characters in stories. Following an analysis of the way Philip Ridley makes the reader think that grandpa (in The Hooligan's Shampoo) is a very unpleasant character, we created a set of success criteria for writing characters with real personalities in our own stories. We used these in two main writing tasks - writing an episode of the Cinderella story which showed that Cinderella's step-mother was a nasty character and writing the opening of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, showing Baby Bear as a very unpleasant child.

In maths, we have continued to be thinking about place value, addition and subtraction. We have learned and practised efficient mental methods for calculating sums like 46+38 and 74-38 mentally and also practised written methods of calculation. Another strand of work in maths has involved spotting number patterns and continuing sequences of numbers.

We have begun our main geography topic this week. The work will help us learn about rivers (how rivers "work", how people's lives are affected by rivers and how rivers are affected by people) and about the water supply industry. We started off with some map-work, finding and marking on a map the main rivers of the UK and then identifying the locations of the continents of the world and some of the major rivers in these continents. Then we moved on to think, in outline, about the water cycle and how water companies obtain water in order to supply it to our homes, schools and work places.

In addition to these activities, we have had the ukuleles out again, had two PE sessions, science and an art lesson.

In English this week, we have used Philip Ridley's novel The Hooligan's Shampoo as a focus for our work on fiction and descriptive writing. We investigated the plot structure used in the book and thought about the way the author has used repetition. Then we wrote an additional episode using this analysis as our guide. We also used the descriptions of exotic goods in Mr. Shopkeeper's shop as a model to write some expanded noun phrases. Today we did a comprehension exercise on an extract from The Shrinking of Treehorn.

After finishing our work on calculations (focussing on multiplication and division) we moved on to a new unit about place value and decimal numbers. Our activities have included ordering and partitioning numbers (including decimal numbers) and thinking about the value of digits in numbers.

We have also continued Desert Island topic, thinking mainly about keeping safe and healthy before moving on to do some work on rules and class rules. In addition, we had our first lesson on the ukulele, two sessions of PE and started our science topic on The Earth in Space.

We have had a short week (beginning on Wednesday) for our first week of term and have focused on English, maths and PSHCE work.

We started off by using the short novel Dinner Ladies Don't Count by Bernard Ashley as the basis of a series of activities - a dictation exercise (to check spellings), some handwriting practice, writing an episode as a prequil to the story and a non-fiction writing activity. In maths, we have been revising some basic maths computation methods - written methods of calculating addition and subtraction sums.

In addition to our English and maths, we have had PE (we played "benchball") and have done a series of PCHCE activities built around the theme of a Desert Island topic. Activities have included thinking about the essentials of life and how these might be found on a desert island, generating ideas for different uses of common objects (e.g. black bin liner, large sweet jar) on a desert island and shelter building from natural materials. These activities have also been intended to develop thinking skills.