MrJennings

This week, we have begun new units of work in both English and maths.

In English, we have started thinking about writing good non-fiction paragraphs.We have used the context of our geography work on rivers to do this so, having researched information about different major world rivers (using books and the internet) and made notes of the important information we found, we had a go at writing a paragraph about the River Volga. Having reflected on our writing, we have been working on increasing the variety of sentence structures we used in our writing to avoid starting a large number of them with a noun or pronoun. We started thinking about the use of a clear, simple sentence to be the first sentence of the paragraph to contain the most important idea and tell the reader clearly about what the paragraph is about and having been trying to start subsequent sentences with a verb, an adverb or a connective. Today in English, we again worked on using a variety of sentence structures when writing a paragraph entitled, My Three Wishes.

Our maths work has involved converting between different units of measurement and revising different ways of presenting data - including pictograms and bar charts. We have done some mathematical experiments, crated tally charts to collect the data and then presented it in different ways.

In addition to these lessons, we have had another science lesson (about phases of the moon), another session with the ukulele, two sessions of PE and finished the week with art again - this time painting water-colour washes.

Our main work in English this week has focussed on improving the way we develop characters in stories. Following an analysis of the way Philip Ridley makes the reader think that grandpa (in The Hooligan's Shampoo) is a very unpleasant character, we created a set of success criteria for writing characters with real personalities in our own stories. We used these in two main writing tasks - writing an episode of the Cinderella story which showed that Cinderella's step-sisters were very unpleasant characters and writing the opening of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, showing Baby Bear as a very naughty child. In maths, we have continued to be thinking about place value, subtraction and mental multiplication and division. We have learned and practised efficient mental methods for calculating sums like 46+38 and 74-38 mentally and also practised written methods of calculation. Another strand of work in maths has involved spotting number patterns and continuing sequences of numbers. We continued our work on the history of Nottingham by using our knowledge of Saxon life to choose a site for a new village and explain the reasoning behind our selection. In addition to these activities, we have had the ukuleles out again, had two PE sessions, science and an art lesson.

In English this week, we have used Philip Ridley's novel The Hooligan's Shampoo as a focus for our work on fiction and descriptive writing. We investigated the plot structure used in the book and thought about the way the author has used repetition. Then we wrote an additional episode using this analysis as our guide. We also used the descriptions of exotic goods in Mr. Shopkeeper's shop as a model to write some expanded noun phrases. Today we did a comprehension exercise on an extract from The Shrinking of Treehorn.

After finishing our work on calculations (focussing on multiplication and division) we moved on to a new unit about place value and decimal numbers. Our activities have included ordering and partitioning numbers (including decimal numbers) and thinking about the value of digits in numbers.

We have also continued Desert Island topic, thinking mainly about keeping safe and healthy and started one of our main units of work for this half term, which is about the development of Nottingham from settlement to town and city. In addition, we had our first two lessons on the ukulele, two sessions of PE and started our science topic on The Earth in Space.

We have had a good first week of the school year.


In English, we have studied the characters and how someone's actions show their mood and personality the the story Dinner Ladies Don't Count by Bernard Ashley. We have done some fiction and some non-fiction  writing arising out of the plot of this story and we have also done some comprehension work using extracts from The Shrinking of Treehorn as our text. Our maths has focused on revising arithmetic methods, making sure that we have remembered these processes after the long holiday.

In addition to fitting in a PE session, our main "topic" for the week has been based around the idea of survival on a desert island. We have thought about what we would need to stay alive and how we could ensure we had water, food and warmth. We have designed and drawn shelters and even made a shelter out of found materials in our school grounds.