MrJennings

We have finished our English unit of work on writing good paragraphs, reviewing the paragraphs we wrote about some famous rivers of the world and writing another new paragraph about our imaginary life as a lion in a safari park or as a pupil at Hogwarts. We finished by again having an exercise in which we wrote the same ideas but constructing the sentences in different ways.

Our maths has been concerned with multiplication and place value (using our times tables and place value knowledge to find answers to sums like 400x7000) and then multiples and factors of numbers. On Thursday we had a review test covering everything we have been learning this half-term and today we went through this together, checking what we got wrong and extending the challenge in areas we got completely correct.

We did some map work in geography marking the major rivers of the UK on an outline map and then doing this for some important European rivers. Earlier in the week we had used the internet to research facts about important rivers and compare information found with that on different websites and in published books. We also related the location of some of the rivers to important cities and, as a challenge and to increase our familiarity with the geography of our own country, we tried to copy (freehand) the outline of the British Isles.

On Wednesday, we did our Harvest presentation in our special assembly to which parents/carers were welcome. We presented the poem "Autumn" by John  Clare (written at the end of the nineteenth century) then read our own poem made up of expanded noun phrases and describing aspects of our wonderful world experienced through each of our five senses.

We have now started our half term holiday.

We have continued with our English unit of work on writing good non-fiction paragraphs this week, writing about another major world river and then changing focus to write a paragraph entitled "My Three Wishes". We also did some "traditional" comprehension work on Thursday.

Our maths this week has focused on addition and subtraction calculations. Early in the week we concentrated on mental methods, practising further the skills that were introduced early in the term and then we moved back to written methods including calculations involving decimal numbers.

On Wednesday, visitors from Childline came to do a special lesson with everyone in Year 5 and 6, we had our usual PE and Spanish lessons on Tuesday and, on Thursday afternoon, we made clay pots ready for us to decorate later in our Bodil Manz designs.

We ended the week by starting to think about our year groups presentation for our Harvest Festival next Wednesday.

We have begun to get to grips with our new unit of work in English. Having done some more research, finding out "facts" about some major rivers of the world, we thought about the writing of good non-fiction paragraphs. We had already tried to do this for the River Volga and we learned how to improve this by using a wider variety of sentence structures. Then we worked with partners to write good paragraphs about another famous river.

Presenting information in graphs has been the focus of our maths work this week. We have used pictograms, bar charts and bar-line charts/graphs and have tried some complete investigations in which we selected a question to investigate, collected data using tallying, created one or more graphs and then recording the answer to the question(s).

We had another session with the ukulele and started to develop our own designs for a decorated pot having examined the style of the Danish ceramicist Bodil Manz. We also had our regular PE and Spanish lessons.

One highlight of the week was that we had a visit from an author, E Reilly, who gave a very entertaining presentation in assembly and helped us to think a little about writing stories.

This has been a short week as school for the class as today has been an INSET Day for the teachers who were thinking about reading.

In maths, we have been thinking about measurement of length. This has included measuring and drawing lines to the nearest millimetre and converting measurements from kilometres to metre and from metres to centimetres and vice versa. On Thursday we moved on to some data handling work in which we had to tally data, present the information in bar charts (with scales of more than one unit) and use these to answer questions.

In English, we have made a start to our learning about non-chronological report paragraphs but, to help our understanding of parts of speech which this work builds on, we have also spent some time on a concrete poetry task relying on correct use of nouns, verbs and adverbs.

Also this week we did some research about the charity Islamic Relief as part of our RE topic on international charities, had our Spanish lesson, our third session with the ukulele and two PE lessons.