MrJennings

In these last two days of term we all completed our woven panels and finished these off by knotting the warp threads and trimming any ends of the wool we used. The panels were then made either into Christmas cards or calendars. We also made origami calendars. On the last day of term we had a Christmas carol service with the whole school and, in the afternoon, we had our Christmas party. I hope that everyone has a good Christmas holiday.

This has been our Christmas Concert week.

Our Years 5 & 6 presented a Christmas production entitled Virtually Christmas - in which the nativity was reimaginged as if modern technology had been available in first century Palestine. The singing and acting was all very good and lots of positive comments were made.

In class, we have done further work on our Mr Men stories - writing, editing and copying up the opening and build-up of our stories. In maths, we did a review test, covering all the main work we have done this half term and in the next few days have started a unit of work on ideas about number and place value focussing on decimals.

We have also made good progress in our work on Belief, Symbols and Art.  We have thought about symbolism in the design of the Christingle (Christianity) and the menorah (Judaism), showing our understanding by producing our own drawings of these and labelling them to show the meanings that are being represented by the elements in our pictures.

We have spent a lot of time on our weaving this week. Some of us are still working on our woven panels while others have finished and have started to prepare the panel for using them to create a Christmas card.

The main excitement of the week has been actually starting to make our woven panels in technology. After finally finishing the frame and "warping up", we began weaving and some have begun the more intricate part of making the picture (which could require up to five bodkins per line). In English we have been learning and thinking about planning stories. We have looked at plotting a story and have now started to write a simple children's story, beginning the with opening before starting to write the events which build up the plot and lead towards the climax. Much of our maths has been concerned with time - telling the time using the 12 and 24 hour clocks and solving problems to do with elapsed time. This afternoon we had a complete run-through of our Christmas production.

We have started a new, fiction, unit of work in our English lessons as we think about the outline structure of short stories.

We have been looking at some simple children's books and trying to identify the opening, the events and build-up, the climax and resolution and the ending. We have enjoyed reading these books and made notes about what the authors have written about in the different elements of the stories. Following that, we have investigated how the opening, build-up and events would have to be different if the resolution and ending was changed, highlighting the way authors lead their readers towards the main climax and resolution. through the earlier parts of the story. In maths, our work has concentrated on multiplication and solving maths problems.

School was closed to the children on Wednesday and we had an RE afternoon on Thursday when we began thinking about the idea of light in different religions. In ICT we started to create a spreadsheet to produce usable data from the water use survey we carried out over the half-term holiday.

Today, in addition to English and maths, we practised for our Christmas concert and made further progress with our weaving frames - now almost everyone is ready to start creating their woven panels.