MrJennings

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.