MrJennings

In maths this week we have been practising and developing mental arithmetic skills. We have thought about different methods of mental addition and subtraction and tried to improve our fluency when using an efficient method. We have also thought about place value, including the value of decimal numbers (tenths - and briefly hundredths and thousandths). We have done some comprehension work in English, developed some more expanded noun phrases and done a little handwriting practice and spelling. We also finished reading The Hooligan's Shampoo.

We have spent a little more time on our Desert Island topic but one of our main areas of work this week has been to make a good start to our local history project. We began by thinking about the Saxon way of life and reminding ourselves of the kinds of villages that were home to Saxons and the farming methods they knew. We thought about the pressures due to land hunger in their north German homelands and imagined a group deciding that, instead of raiding other surrounding villages for food, they would search for a new place to live in the island to the west. After having a village meeting to decide what kind of place we would look for, we did a group problem-solving activity to select a site using a map of a real place and each group managed to select a site with a perfect profile of features for Saxons (including nearby streams, forest, pasture land, a highish dry space for their huts, soft sandy soil for ploughing and a navigable river they could use for transporting goods).

We had another lesson with the ukulele, two PE sessions (one indoors, one outside), our Spanish session with Mrs. Thompson and finished to week with art, trying out different brush techniques using a flat (or chisel) brush.