MrJennings

Our work in English this week has been all about instruction texts. Writing instructions themselves is not particularly challenging, so we have focussed our attention on making sure that we can write good introductions and raise the standard of our work by including helpful hints and tips and really engaging the reader with our style of writing.

In maths, we have been working on ideas about two dimensional shapes. We have thought about the properties of shapes, sorted them, revised the names of polygons (including different quadrilaterals) and investigated diagonals in polygons. A key part of our work has been learning and using language and mathematical terms needed to describe and compare shapes and we have some of this vocabulary as the basis of our spelling lists this week.

We have started our first history topic of the year - about the history of Nottingham. We started off by learning about the life of Saxon people and then the scenario was that a group of Saxons, due to land-hunger in their homeland meant that the needed to find a new place to live. After group discussions considering the sort of place that they would look for, groups "virtually" explored an area and chose a suitable site for their new village in a new land. We then compared our choices with those made by a real group of Saxons who made their way through what is now England in around 650 AD.

We have also made a start on our technology project for the term. This is our weaving topic. We have sawn the wood for our weaving frame and sanded the sawn ends. We also started practising the songs for our Christmas production with our other Year 5 and 6 classes.