MrJennings

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.