MrJennings

The highlight of our week was a visit to Southwell Minster to take part in the "Time Travelling" event. We had a whole-day visit which included participating in six main activities learning about different aspects of the minster and what goes on there. There were also two short "assemblies" to start and conclude the day. Today we started creating a scrapbook of the things we did at the Minster and what it made us think of and feel.

In English this week, we have continued following the story of the Odyssey while our maths has covered ideas involving problem-solving, interpreting calculator displays and decimal numbers. We have also spent some time on our history work, thinking about the homes of ancient Greek people and making comparisons with the design of modern British homes.

We have continued our English work based on the story of The Odyssey in English this week with activities including summarising the plot of different episodes and doing some grammar work on pronouns.

In maths, our learning has covered negative numbers, understanding square numbers, decimals (rounding, doubling and halving decimal numbers) and complements.

One of our main areas of work this week has been our new history topic about ancient Greece. We have learned about the "polis" of ancient Greece and how the country was organised into essentially independent city states at that time. We then thought about the agora in Athens in more detail and undertook a piece of work comparing this to the market in our Nottingham Victoria Centre.

This week we also started a new topic in RE. This is about special places, pilgrimage and prayer. We learned about the Hajj using internet sources and next week we will be having a day at Southwell Minster.

We finished the week by doing some more DT, this time building towers and aiming for the highest tower we could create with a 10 cm x 10 cm piece of card and then we finished reading The Iron Man together.

Our English unit is based on myths and legends, linked with our forthcoming history topic about ancient Greece. We have started watching episodes of a tv programme re-telling the story of Homer's Illyad - The Odessey - and have been enjoying this. We have been summarising the plot of the story after each episode, reflecting on the problems encountered by the characters and how the hero, Odysseus, overcomes them. We have also done some descriptive writing and moved on to recounting an episode from the story, experimenting with telling this through the eyes of the main character.

In maths, we have been developing and extending our skills and knowledge in relation to fractions, decimals and percentages. We have learned about mixed numbers and improper fractions (and practised converting between these) and found fractions of numbers and quantities. Then we moved on to revise simple percentages, relate these to fractions (and decimals) and then find answers to problems based on percentages of numbers.

We have undertaken a full investigation in science to complete our topic on light. We were give the scenario that a manufacturer of cycle helmets is planning a new range and wished to know which (of a series of materials) was the most reflective. We have to plan our investigation, carry this out and write up our science report (including a graph of the results) to send off to the manufacturer.

Today we began our new design technology topic which is concerned with bridges and strong, stable structures. We investigated with ways to make a sheet of paper stick out as far as possible from the desk and then moved on to making and testing simple beams with different cross-sections (circular, triangular and square).