MrJennings

In this first week of the Summer Term, we have started a new unit of work in English focussing on persuasive writing. This week we have thought about advertisements and the persuasive techniques advert writers use including use of expert and celebrity opinion, statistics, rhetorical questions, repetition, half-truth, emotive language and exaggeration. We have looked at several adverts, distinguished between fact and opinion in persuasive texts and written two adverts of our own - one a "poster style" advert and one a more text-based example.

At the start of the week we began by revising multiplication and division methods in maths and then we moved on to work on capacity. We have been converting between units (litres and millilitres), reading scales, calculating with measures of capacity and solving problems.

We started our second main Geography topic of the year, which is a study of aspects of the Lake District, by learning about the key landscape features of the areas from photographs and by thinking about "National Parks" in relation to country parks and local parks. Continuing with our history project on life in ancient Greece, we thought about the lives of men in those days (especially their working lives) using images of ancient Greek vase paintings and to interpret and make inferences about how the olive harvest was accomplished and how ancient Greeks bought shoes which fit them.

We finished the week with some water-colour painting.

In the last week of term, we have finished our description writing and most of us have also finished our long stories, including the illustrations. We have made some of these up into books and the remainder will be completed after Easter.

Our maths this week has focussed on problems involving converting between different units and then moved on to number work, thinking about understanding large numbers (up to a million) and decimal numbers. The learning included sequencing numbers, understanding place value and rounding numbers.

We completed our unit of work on human life cycles by doing some more thinking about development after birth, from childhood to adulthood and changes that occur as people move into old age. In history, we looked at the design of homes in ancient Greece, comparing these with our homes in Britain today and then trying to develop explanations about how the design of ancient Greece homes developed from simple one-roomed hut to the part two-storey courtyard buildings of the classical period.

We ended the week by testing to destruction the bridge structures we have made in technology.

We are now on our Easter Holidays.