MrJennings

We have continued to think about persuasive writing in our English activities. We have looked at some examples of written arguments and annotated them to highlight the key features. In order to help us plan our own writing, we have also looked at texts and picked out the main points of their arguments and the supporting details, examples and explanations. Today, we worked together to plan an argument (about children and mobile phones) and than began to write the argument.

Our maths work has concentrated upon multiplication and division calculations. We have practised mental maths process, but also tried long multiplication methods and worked hard at the processes involved in computing answers to division sums. This work has including solving maths problems, including those which require several steps to find the answer.

We have started our new Religious Education topic which is about Sikhism. We did this by starting to think about identity, the groups we belong to and the way people use badges and uniforms. We they watched a short video programme to help us understand some of the basic Sikh beliefs and important, basic facts about the religion. We enjoyed comparing different translations of the Mool Mantar, thinking and talking about meanings and the phrases which seemed most meaningful to us. We have also created badges/logos of our own to show the things in life which we think are the most important of all.

We finished the week with some art in which we tried using a broad chisel brush to paint with. We spent the lesson investigating the different types of effects that we could produce.

In the first week of our Summer Term, we have started a new unit of work in English concerned with understanding and creating persuasive writing. This week, we have looked at some advertisements designed for posters and magazines and thought about the persuasive techniques that have been used (including opinion presented as fact, hyperbole, bias, half-truth, etc.) We have tried some exercises distinguishing fact from opinion and stripped out opinion from some adverts to consider just the bare facts. We have also written some adverts ourselves, annotating them to show the persuasive techniques we used in them.

The maths work this week has been concerned with number and place value. This has involved ordering and rounding numbers and finding complements to 100, 10 and 1 (using numbers to two decimal places). We have also done some calculator work.

Apart from this, our main work has been to learn about childhood and child rearing practices in ancient Athens. We have found about about how children were named, how boys and girls were treated very differently from the age of about 6 and what happened in Greek schools. We created a table to compare the lives of boys and girls in those days and wrote an evaluation to explain whether we thought boys or girls had the happier lives in those days. In addition, we found pictures of ancient Greek toys to draw and describe and tried playing "knuckle-bones".

We had two PE lessons, started a new science topic on life cycles and did a little more "one-point perspective" drawing in art.