MrJennings

In English this week, we have completed our work on writing non-fiction paragraphs for a non-chronological report about the stages in the "life" of a river. We made notes and wrote about the upper course of a river with a partner and, today, we finished writing a paragraph about the lower course of a river independently.

In maths, we spent some time following up ideas that the recent test suggested were less well remembered and have learned about factors, multiples and common multiples before moving on to begin thinking about the properties of 3D shapes. In these activities we have used Carroll diagrams and Venn diagrams to present and investigate numbers and shape properties.

We had a science focus for much of our work this week. We did some practical work to demonstrate the water cycle, focussing on condensation and the role of heating and cooling in the cycle. We also spent time thinking about what we know about solids, liquids and gases and learning how scientists would describe these.

We have also undertaken a series of activities developing exploration and problem solving skills. We did some adventurous, problem-solving activities in PE, read an adventure-book story (where you have to make choices about which page you turn to next and mapping our choices so that we could later explore alternatives) and trying an art investigation.

We have now begun our autumn half-term holiday.

This has been our harvest week at school so we had a rehearsal on Tuesday morning and our harvest service (to which parents were invited) on Wednesday morning. Our class worked with our other Year 5 class to give a presentation about all the ways that plants are used - so we were thinking of the ways that crops are used in medicines, as building materials, in household chemicals, furnishings and clothing as well as for our food.

In English this week, we have begun writing a non-chronological report about the stages in the "life" of a river. Having watched a short video and read the relevant chapter of a book, we made notes about the sources of rivers. We then used these to write a paragraph about the sources of rivers together as a class. Our maths has focussed on addition and subtraction again, and we also had a maths test, covering the work that we have done this term so that we can review what we have remembered well and which things it would be helpful to think about again.

We have finished our science work on Earth in Space and also had a science afternoon in which we investigated variables which affect the speed of evaporation. We used a pipette to place drops of water onto a paper towel and then timed how long it took for the wet area to evaporate either when left alone or placed on a radiator, under a hand-drier, fanned, waved in the air, held vertical, held in a hand or left in an air-tight container.

Today we had a special activity day, with a range of different music and design technology activities. Each class had four different activities with four different teachers. These activities included designing and improving helicopter spinners (linked to thinking about seed dispersal) which would fall as slowly as possible; designing a pencil pot; creating a boat to hold a Lego figure using paper, drinking straws and lolly sticks; making cards; creating a piece of music and thinking about the instruments of the orchestra. It was a very enjoyable day.

We have had a short week this week as the teachers had an INSET day on Friday - our traditional "Goose Fair" INSET day in case parents wanted to take their children to the fair.

We have continued our focus in writing in our English lessons. We have worked with a partner to write paragraphs entitled My Three Wishes and My Greatest Achievements of 2014, making sure that we used a clear, simple sentence to start the paragraph and then follow this with sentences which add details and examples trying to start these sentences in different ways. We then marked our own work against our success criteria and many of us were also able to write a concluding or "summing up" sentence to end the paragraph.

In our Geography work about water, we watched an excerpt from a video about the water industry and answered questions about how the water authorities obtain supplies of water. In science we have been learning about the water cycle and the processes involved in this.

In maths, after completing our work on graphs with some mathematical experiments in which the results were presented in bar or bar-line charts, we started thinking about measures and converting measures into different units (e.g. converting kilometres to metres, metres to centimetres, centimetres to millimetres and vice versa). We have also practised measuring accurately in millimetres.

Although we only had a four day week, we managed to fit in an art lesson, this time drawing our trees on to the graduated water-colour washes we produced last week.