MrJennings

This has been our Arts Week at school.

The main activity of the week revolved around the visit of the artist, Paul Priestley, who came and led a day about Pablo Picasso. This included a workshop session on drawing faces. Following an illustrated talk about Picasso's life, he showed us how, in one of his styles, the artist represented the human face. We had a go at producing our own pictures in the style the following day.

In addition to this activity, we also concluded our half-term's art topic on Bodil Manz by painting the clay pots we made last week and, the next day, the children applied the Manz-style designs that they had settled on. We also wrote up our work in our sketchbooks.

Our maths work focused on investigations this week. These included some problem-solving activities and investigations about creating different shapes from two smaller ones and exploring permutations and combinations. We did this in the context of both creating restaurant menus and graphics.

In ICT we created a Welcome Booklet for potential new pupils in our class and used the Arrive Alive booklet to make and answer quiz questions about road safety.

Our maths work this week has concentrated on addition and subtraction computation and a little more work on line graphs. This has also been our "end of year" test week for English.

In geography we have studied the activities on a Lake District hill farm through the year and learned about the changes that have taken place in the environment as a result of the reduction in number of farm worker in the area during the last fifty years. We have also thought about the economics of farming by discussing the sources of income and expenditure for a farmer.

In our history work about ancient Greece, we have been thinking about the Greek alphabet and language and how our own alphabet has been influenced by this. We identified the letter shapes that have come to us from Greek and which ones have "kept" their sounds. We also "translated" some words from their Greek spellings to our alphabet and looked at some English words (like telephone) which have been created from elements originating in Greek.

We did some orienteering in PE this week and this afternoon, in art, we continued our containers topic by making our pots from clay.

Next week is arts week in school.

We have been revising and practising a range of computational methods in maths (including calculator work). Later in the week we did our "end of year" maths tests. In English, we have continued our persuasive writing, focussing on writing letters to present an argument. We have written letters about improving wet playtime activities and about the benefits of pedestrianising Digby Avenue, concentrating on the organisation of the overall texts and the main paragraphs. In history, we finished off some work about the lives of women in ancient Greece and, in geography, we began a piece of work about hill farming in the Lake District.

Although this was a short week, we had our usual PE and science sessions and we finished the week by spending a little more time on our art and design topic about containers.

We have continued our work on persuasive writing in English. After studying and annotating a written argument in terms of its organisation and language features, we have looked more closely at the writing of the main paragraphs and opening paragraph of this type of text. We have learned how to plan a written argument by thinking about the main points and details included in exemplar texts and re-creating the author's plan. We have then planned texts of our own by generating lots of ideas and then sorting them under two or three headings. Today we started writing our own arguments about "wet playtimes".

In maths, our focus has been on units of measurement (mainly of capacity). We have also done some more work on reading scales (and interpreting them to judge quantities between the marks on the scale) before moving on to drawing and interpreting line graphs.

We have done a little more in our history work (thinking about the lives of children and comparing the lives of rich and poor women in ancient Athens) and have completed a unit in our geography topic about forestry in the Lake District. We finished the week by starting an art topic about containers.