MrJennings

We have begun a new series of lessons in English this week, turning our attention to poetry. The focus has been on reading and writing concrete and shape poems. We have looked at and written cinquains and other shape poems on the themes of spring, summer and (linking with our geography and science work) water and rivers.

In maths, we spent some time following up ideas that the recent test suggested were less well remembered and have learned about factors, multiples and common multiples before moving on to begin thinking about the properties of 3D shapes. In these activities we have used Carroll diagrams and Venn diagrams to present and investigate numbers and shape properties.

We have finished our science work on Earth in Space and also had a science afternoon in which we investigated variables which affect the speed of evaporation. We used a pipette to place drops of water onto a paper towel and then timed how long it took for the wet area to evaporate either when left alone or placed on a radiator, under a hand-drier, fanned, waved in the air, held vertical, held in a hand or left in an air-tight container.

In addition, we have played the ukulele, had two sessions of PE outdoors in lovely weather and painted.

School has now broken up for its autumn half-term holiday.

This has been our harvest week at school so we had a rehearsal on Tuesday morning and our harvest service (to which parents were invited) on Wednesday morning. Our class worked with our other Year 5 class to give a presentation about all the different workers who are involved in bringing bread to our plates.

In English this week, we have completed our work on writing non-fiction paragraphs for a non-chronological report about the stages in the "life" of a river. Having made notes about and written a paragraph about the sources of rivers together as a class, we made notes and wrote about the upper course of a river with a partner and, today, we finished writing a paragraph about the lower course of a river independently. Our maths has focussed on addition and subtraction again, but this time the calculations have involved decimal numbers, including money and length. We have also been converting centimetres to metre, metres to kilometres and vice versa.

We have begun some science work connected with our topic on Rivers and Water. We thought about the water cycle and labelled a diagram to indicate where evaporation, condensation, precipitation and transportation take place and the role of heating and cooling in the the cycle. We also sequenced some cards illustrating and explaining the stages in the water cycle, and which extended this to include the use of water by people.

We had another session with the ukuleles, produced final picture in our short art topic on shading and pencil techniques and had two sessions of PE.

We had a maths test today, covering the work that we have done this term so that we can review what we have remembered well and which things it would be helpful to think about again.

Next week we have our parents' evenings.

We have had a short week this week as the teachers had an INSET day on Friday - our traditional "Goose Fair" INSET day in case parents wanted to take their children to the fair.

We have continued our focus in writing in our English lessons. We have worked with a partner to write a paragraph about the River Amazon, making sure that we used a clear, simple sentence to start the paragraph and then follow this with sentences which add details and examples trying to start these sentences in different ways. We then marked our own work against our success criteria before working by ourselves to write a similar paragraph about the River Nile. Later in the week we did some work on adverbs and thinking about how these words can add precision and variety to our writing.

Next week we will be writing non-fiction paragraphs which will build into a full non-chronological report about the different stages in the "life" of a river. In advance of this, in our geography lessons, we watched a video about the River Severn and used this and information from a text book to find out and make notes about sources of rivers.

In maths, after completing our work on graphs with some mathematical experiments in which the results were presented in bar or bar-line charts, we started thinking about measures and converting measures into different units (e.g. converting kilometres to metres, metres to centimetres, centimetres to millimetres and vice versa). We also practised measuring accurately in millimetres.

Although we only had a four day week, we managed to fit in an art lesson, this time learning how to produce graduated washes using water colour. This was a development of the work we did last week using pencil crayons and the resulting painted washes will form the backgrounds to our finished pictures of winter trees.