MrJennings

This has been our test week at school, when we use tests in English and maths to help us monitor progress in these subjects. These cover reading, writing and spelling, mental and written maths (including the use of a calculator). In addition, we have looked at division in mathematics, including changing the quotient to a fraction and also, in maths problems, considering whether the answer requires you to round up or round down to give the answer. In English, we have revised the writing of dialogue, including the correct punctuation of speech as we wrote conversations between the children and the parents who are characters in the Grandpa Chatterji book.

We have completed our games programming work in ICT (improving the programmes we created in using "Scratch", by adding further graphics and timers etc.) and also tried to complete our PowerPoint presentations in RE (about the Sikh Gurdwara) and Science (about seed dispersal).

We made a prototype "cam" mechanism in Design Technology and made notes about this ready to consider ideas for the designs we should use for our final products.

We ended the week practising the song which we will perform in our Jubilee Concert at school next week.

This has been SATs week for our Year 6 pupils - so well done to them for working well through it.

We have continued with our usual curriculum. We have been working on our Grandpa Chatterji text in English, looking at the second and third chapters. We have thought about the variety of words the author has employed instead of using "said" over and over again and also done some work on connectives and complex sentences. Another element of our studies has been to consider the different aspects of Indian culture that we have learned about from the text.

In maths, the main work has been concerned with number and calculations. We have revised and practised doing some harder addition and subtraction sums, including problems, and also spent time on decimals, developing fluency in finding complements to 1, 10 and whole hundreds.

We have learned about the Gurdwara in RE. Having been given a set of pictures of a Gurdwara, we researched these Sikh places of worship on the internet and used this information, with the pictures, to begin creating a PowerPoint presentation.

We finished with week with some technology, making and investigating a simple model with levers and linkages.

Although this was a short week, as it began with a bank holiday, we started a new unit of work in English. This is concerned with a study of fiction set in cultures other than our own. The main text we use for this in Year 5 is a Jamila Gavin book entitled Grandpa Chatterji. We have started to pick up ideas about Indian culture, but have focused on other aspects of the writing this week, including thinking about the effects of writing in different tenses and in the first rather than the third person. We have also written another argument - this time trying to persuade the council to improve the amenities at Mapperley Top.

In maths, the focus of the work has continued to be about graphs and the interpretation of line graphs. We linked this with some of our science and PE activities in that we monitored our breathing rates after different types of exercise and created graphs to present the results of our findings. Another piece of science work we did this week was to plan an experiment to investigate the conditions necessary for seeds to germinate.

In addition to having another art lesson using the chisel brush, we also began thinking about the main Design Technology topic for this term, which will be to design and make an automaton using cams and cranks. We had a look at some presentations about automata that others have created to help us understand the range of possibilities for this kind of device. Then we drew a diagram to show the components of the mechanism and describe the movement.

We have continued with our work on persuasive writing this week by planning and writing complete texts to argue a particular case. We have practised planning the writing by generating lots of ideas and organising them under a few main headings and have also worked on improving the quality of our introductory and concluding paragraphs.

As well as continuing our focus on mental maths skills, our main mathematics work has been about graphs, and line graphs in particular. We have drawn graphs and answered questions about them. We have also considered the "stories" that a graph can tell, trying to think of different plausible explanations for (for example) changes in gradient.

We had a special RE afternoon on Wednesday when we learned about the 5Ks of Sikhism. We used expert groups to explore objects representing the 5Ks, drawing and thinking of questions we might ask about them before reporting back to our home groups. We then learned about the religious significance of the 5Ks using a video and text and sorted a series of statements to match them to the appropriate object.

In ICT we continued our computer programming work using Scratch. This week we tried to create a car race game including cursor control of the car and a timer. Some of us managed to include a score feature where points were lost every time the car left the course.