MrJennings

In English this week, having completed our writing about the life of a river, linking with our geography topic, we have done some comprehension activities. The first of these was based on an extract from the children's book The Shrinking of Treehorn, with our focus being on giving full, detailed answers with explanation when possible and appropriate. During the remainder of the week, we based our comprehension on comic-book style pages about the work of the Severn-Trent Water Authority. This also linked to our Geography topic and helped us understand the role and work of the authority as well as practice our English skills in answering questions requiring explanation, extrapolation and converting information into different forms. One of our PE lessons this week also connected with our geography as our task was to create a sequence of gymnastic movements to represent the life of a river. This involved starting with fast movements, including quick rolls and tumbling motions moving into slower movement with twists and turns and ending in wide, slowly formed shapes.

We addressed some issues which many had with written addition and subtraction calculations at the beginning of the week and kept up with practice on our mental addition and subtraction as we moved on the thinking about multiplication and using and applying our understanding of multiples.

We had an RE lesson (thinking about Christian and Islamic teachings about giving and use of money), our last lesson of our science unit about Earth in Space (as part of which we did a review test) and we also did some more painting, again creating a background using a graduated wash and then using thicker paint to suggest summer trees.

We had a special time today where everyone had a chance to choose an activity to do in a lesson, in recognition of effort and good behaviour this term, and we finished the week (and our half term) by starting to make the pieces for our weaving frames which we will use in our design technology project next term.

School is currently on its autumn half-term holiday.

This has been our harvest week at school so we had a rehearsal on Wednesday morning and our harvest service (to which parents were invited) on Thursday morning. Our class worked with our other Year 5 class to give a presentation about the choices that shoppers have to make when buying food including, for example, deciding whether to buy organic produce, fairtrade products or locally grown goods.

In addition to our harvest work, we have started thinking about the work and impact of tow major international charities - Christian Aid and Islamic Relief. We have been investigating these charities by studying the websites to discover their aims, how they go about achieving these, the countries they work in and how they raise funds to continue their projects.

 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 (using two sources of information - text and video) 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.

 Our maths focus, after undertaking some mathematical investigations (the results of which were presented in graphs and charts) has been on addition and subtraction calculation. We have been learning and practicing efficient methods of doing mental calculations as well as checking up on our written methods.

We finished the week with some more water colour painting.

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. 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. In maths, have continued our thinking about data handling and presenting data in graphs. We did some mathematical experiments and presented the results in bar charts, bar-line charts and pictograms. Then we discussed the advantages and disadvantages of these different representations. We have had two ICT lessons about databases. We thought about the use of databases and the kinds of places that would have databases including information about ourselves (including school, the doctors, the library) and talked about what information they might store, why it is useful to them and how they might use it. On the computer, we have learned how to use "sort" and "search" commands (including Boolean logic AND and OR operators) and then used these tools in a series of problem solving challenges which required us to identify likely "offenders" on the basic of partial clues about a person from eye-witnesses. We have also learned to enter data into a database and interrogate the database to identify likely errors which need to be corrected. Although we only had a four-day week, we managed to finish our art work, have PE, a science lesson about Earth in Space and start looking at our year group's harvest presentation with our parallel class.