MrJennings

This week, in our history topic about ancient Greece, we have been thinking about the jobs of craftsmen. We learned about the range of crafts which were existed in ancient Athens and about how Pericles felt that every craftsman should be paid the same rate to work on municipal projects. We took the role of a historian to use pictorial evidence to describe and explain how an Athenian would be able to buy a pair of shoes to fit him and then looked at the job of the potter and artist in some depth. We tried to recreate pictures using the "black figure ware" and the "red figure ware" techniques.

Our maths has covered a range of areas including calculator work measures of weight (including converting measures from one unit to another - e.g. kilogrammes to grammes), measuring angles with a protractor and finding areas of rectangles.

We completed our design technology topic on bridges by finishing our final bridge structures and then testing them - to destruction! The "winning" structures supported over 5 kg and one even supported 7 kg and had a strength to weight ratio of more than 60.

After creating some bit-map images in ICT last week, we used vector graphics to create the same types of image this week. We learned about grouping and ordering objects and tried moving and resizing them. By doing this, we also learned about some of the features and characteristics of images made with a vector graphics application in contrast to a bit-map image.

Our maths this week has included lessons on coordinates, finding areas of rectangles and multiplication while, in English, we have done some work on improving and extending sentences. Some of our English has been based on aspects of our history topic. We have been thinking about homes and farming in ancient Greece and have written explanations about how the design of homes developed in ancient Greece and why the olive might be considered the most important crop to an Athenian.

We have started making our final structures in our "bridges" technology project, we did tennis skills in PE and, today, we finished the week by having a go at drawing a room using three-point perspective.

Our work in maths, this week, has been concerned with developing ideas about number. This has involved activities with negative numbers, including sequencing numbers and calculating differences. We have also revisited doubling and halving and using complements (complements to 10, 100 and 1000).

We have brought our work on Greek myths and legends to an end by reading some further myths and completing some comprehension and sequencing activities. We have also made games based on the story of the Odyssey. Our board games include lots of chance cards and we made these by thinking of the events in the story and whether each of these brought good fortune or bad fortune for Odysseus. We then wrote each event on a chance card together with an action (miss a go; have another turn; go back three spaces; go forward four steps) appropriate to the event, reflecting the effect it had on Odysseus' goal of retuning to his wife and son in Ithaca.

The focus of our learning about ancient Greece has been the polis or city-state. We have learned about the features of the polis and compared some features (such as the agora) with their modern equivalents.

Most of us finished our "Wonderful World" music videos in time to show our parents at one of our Parents' Evenings which took place this week and we had our French and PE sessions as usual.

To finish the week, we used K'NEX to investigate stability in structures. We made sets of models which all had to be the same except to legs. Some sets had to have the same number of legs but different length legs, the other sets had to have the same sized legs, but different numbers of legs. When we tested the models, we found out that the shorter the legs, the more stable the models were. We also found out that three-legged models were particularly stable.

The most significant event of the week was our visit to Southwell Minster on the Time Travelling experience.

This was an excellent day. We travelled by coach to Southwell and the day started with an assembly in the nave of the minster with almost 300 children from other schools. Following this, each of our groups took part in six different activities (three before and three after lunch) based on some of the signs and symbols of Christianity found in the church.

Before we went to Southwell, we thought more about the idea of pilgrimage by considering the idea of special places. We thought about places that feel special to us and about why they are special. We also followed up our visit on Thursday and Friday by making a scrap book reflecting on our visit.

This work has taken up a lot of our time this week, but we have also done a little more on our "myths and legends" focus. We watched the end of the "Odyssey" video and did a piece of comprehension work on a passage about the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece.

Our maths work has been about fractions, decimals and percentages this week. We have learned about mixed numbers and related these to improper fractions. Today we played a board game which helped us to link fractions to their decimal and percentage equivalents.

In addition, we tried to finish off our Wonderful World videos and saved the finished versions and had our weekly French and PE sessions.

We have continued thinking about ancient Greek myths and legends in our English lessons this week. We have watched some more episodes of the "Odyssey" video and thought about the features of stories which retell myths. Later in the week, we have done some writing, trying to write from the point of view of one of the characters in the story.

In maths, we have done some work on proportion (mentioning "ratio" for comparison purposes) and solving problems based on proportions. We have also revised the processes involved in working through division calculations and using these to find fractions of numbers.

Next week, we will be going to Southwell Minster for our "time travelling" visit. In preparation for this, we have been thinking about "pilgrimage". We have used some websites to find out about the Hajj, including the sequence and timetable of activities that pilgrims undertake as well as some of the reasons and purposes of them. We have also thought about places that are special to us and thought about how we (and our families) "connect" with different places.

In addition to our PE and French sessions, we had another lesson on the tin whistle and learned some songs ready for the "assembly" at Southwell Minster.