MrJennings

In our final week of the term, in addition to finding time for some "normal" activities, we finished off our main technology project. We completed any remaining weaving; wrote evaluations of the bodkins we have made and tested; "finished" the woven panels by cutting the cloth off the frame, knotting the warp threads and trimming these before turning the ends over and attaching the weaving to a Christmas or greetings card we had created.

We also had another design technology project this week. This involved food. Our our class contribution to the Christmas Part food, our class designed and made canapés, popcorn and punch. The canapés were the most complicated. On Monday we tested different toasted bread bases, different "butter" spreads and different kinds of toppings that we had designed having thought about balanced died and the dietary needs of different pupils (including vegetarians). In the end we used wholemeal bread bases and had four different toppings. These were: ham, peperoni, red pepper and cucumber; ham, soft cheese, apple and tomato; cheese, soft cheese, tomato and green pepper and tuna mayonnaise, cucumber and/or tomato or pepper. Also on the Monday, we made and tested a variety of flavourings to go with popcorn and, in the end served salt and pepper popcorn and sweet cinnamon popcorn at the parties.

 We had our year-group's party with Y6 on Wednesday and our school Carol Service on Friday (the last day of term) when both Year 5 classes performed a Charles Causley poem.

This was the week of our Christmas production and all the Year 5 and 6 singers and the Year 6 actors gave us some fantastic performances in our show, based on the Charles Dickens' novel A Christmas Carol.

The performances took some of our time this week, but we also made good progress in our technology project. Most of us are quite close to finishing our woven panels and we started a new section of our project. This is about designing and making bodkins. We began by looking at a few commercially produced bodkins and listed some of the key features of these before thinking of what we could make some bodkins out of. Then we created some designs of our own. Next week we will make and test these.

In RE, we studied the Christingle. We looked at pictures and three different descriptions/explanations of the symbolism of these before creating our own drawings of these and annotating them with the object, what is represents and what it reminds Christians of.

Our English work continued our instruction writing (doing further work on our weaving frame instruction text and writing or improving a text giving instructions to make a jam sandwich) while our maths included work on measuring and calculating perimeters and our end of term maths test.

We have continued with our unit of work on instruction writing this week. Having written introductions and endings for instructions about how to polish your shoes, we turned our attention to writing instructions to tell someone how to make a weaving frame. (This links with our design technology project.)

In maths we did some work on maths problems at the start of the week, making sure that we read the questions carefully and find the essential information before deciding and doing the calculations. Later in the week, we concentrated on telling the time and using the 24-hour clock.

We have spent some time with our weaving this week and most of us have made very good progress towards finishing our woven panels and we have also had two full rehearsals of our Christmas production. This is based on Charles Dicken's story, A Christmas Carol and is set in a 21st century television studio where the key question of a Crimewatch Christmas Special is whether Scrooge really changed or was kidnapped or murdered and replaced by someone who would be generous with all Scrooge's money!