MrJennings

We have taken a break from our story writing this week to do some instruction writing. Most of us are already good at writing instruction sentences using imperative verbs and sequence connectives, so our focus has been upon writing whole texts by including good opening and endings sections (which give background information and encourage the reader to have a go at following the instructions).

In maths, we have practised estimating and using a calculator to answer simple calculations and have also been tacking problems which require several calculations to find the answer. We have also done some measurement - estimating and measuring the length of objects in millimetres.

Hindu iconography has been the subject of a further lesson in RE - symbolism in religious art - in which we looked at and compared various artist representations of Ganesha.

We have also done a little more weaving, started to prepare for designing our own bodkins and had our science, PE and music sessions.

We have continued our story writing this week, thinking about writing (and punctuating) speech and focussing on checking and improving the quality of our own writing. We have written further episodes of our "Mr Men" style story and a further short story.

Our maths has mostly been connected with the theme of multiplication. We have found factors of numbers (drilling down to find prime factors) and we have started to learn how to do long multiplication sums. We developed our understanding of the process by using estimation, by partitioning and by examining what happens at each step of the computational process. Today, we learned about multiplication of decimal numbers.

In RE we examined and investigated three pieces of artwork imagining the annunciation. We compared them and learned about the religious imagery the artists included. We then used these ideas in our own pictures, imagining God sending a message to the people of the Philippines and in writing about the angel in one of the pictures we examined.

In addition, this week, we did science (about evaporation), DT (doing more of our actual weaving), music, ICT (using spreadsheets to produce a range of graphs) and PE (dance and hockey activities).

We have continued with our story-writing unit of work in English this week. We have drafted and written openings for our stories and at least drafted the first episode in the "build-up"/events of the story. We have also, today, written a complete short story.

Our learning in maths has been concerned with understanding how fractions relate to division, to decimal fractions and to percentages. We have also been finding fractions of numbers and quantities (e.g. 1/4 of 24kg). Today, we moved on to other calculations, using our knowledge of "tables facts" to find answers to calculations involving larger numbers.

We started new work in both ICT and RE this week. Having completed our databases work last half term, we are now using MS Excel to learn about spreadsheets. As an introduction to spreadsheets, we looked at a spreadsheet which calculated party costs. In this, there was a series of party items - each with individual prices - and a place to indicate the numbers of each item required and the spreadsheet computed the total cost of each item and the overall cost. The prices and quantities required could all be changed and we explored the effects of making changes and some of the cells which displayed the results of calculations. Having done this, we learned how to select groups of cells and to make calculations before making our own spreadsheets to add a list of values. To start our RE topic on symbolism and religious art, we thought about the idea of light and dark (creating concept maps) and considered the "meaning" of light in many everyday expressions. We also had an opportunity to look at and write about a piece of art representing the concept of freedom.

We finished the week with some singing and an English activity about the punctuation and layout of direct and reported speech.

In English this week, we began a unit of work on fiction writing. We have focused on planning stories by analysing the plot of some short children's stories (including Mr. Men stories). Towards the end of the week we tried planning our own stories, including creating different climax/resolution scenarios for stories about the same characters.

After concluding our unit of work about shape by thinking about the properties of 2D shapes, we have started a new maths unit to help develop our understanding of fractions. Our main thinking has been about equivalent fractions and we have made fraction walls, created "fraction families" and noted the relationships between numerator and denominator to help us understand.

In our Tuesday science session, we thought about air. We investigated the amount of air in a litre of sand and a litre of gravel and started to think about a way to determine if air has a weight.

We had an extended DT session on Friday when we completed our weaving frames. We had to lightly saw little notches in the end pieces of wood to guide and hold the warp threads, then we had to lay out the four pieces of wood for the frame and glue the card triangles to secure the corners of the frame.

We have had a poetry week at school to start off our new half-term. Our focus has been concrete (or shape) poems and we have taken autumn and autumn events and activities as our themes. We studied different examples of concrete poems and then generated ideas, developed and improved lives for poems before using these to create the poem itself. Our maths has been about shape - mainly 3D shapes - and we have been learning how to visualise shapes, to classify shapes using our knowledge of the properties of shapes.

We begun our new history topic by revising knowledge about life in Saxon times. From this we identified the sorts of things that a Saxon community would look for if they were seeking a new place to settle. After examining an area, groups chose a suitable site for their new village and wrote a message to "the folks back home" to let them know all the good features of the site they had found. Interestingly, because they made good use of their knowledge of Saxon life, all our groups chose a site that real Saxon settlers used over 1400 years ago.

We also had our Tuesday PE and Science sessions, PE on Thursday learning some cricket skills and we finished the week starting to learn the songs for our Years 5 & 6 Christmas production.