MrJennings

This has been our Enterprise Week at school, ending in our Summer Fair organised by our Year 6 pupils. Along with the other classes, we had to make and sell something at the fair to raise money for school funds. We made knotted friendship bracelets and key rings. They were cheap and quite quick to make and we sold the bracelets for 20p and the key rings for 30p. There was a good profit margin on these as the materials cost very little (even the split rings for the key rings cost less than 4p each).

In geography, we thought more about the life of a hill farmer in the Lake District and, recognising that sheep farming by itself is unlikely to provide a living, our problem-solving task to to decide in which ways a farmer could diversify to ensure a good income.

Our RE work was concerned with the langar and langar meal in which we thought about how this is a reflection of some major Sikh beliefs.

We had some time to do a little English (thinking about the character of Grandpa Leicester) and maths work (about square numbers and about timetables) this week in addition to our Tuesday science and PE sessions.

This has been another four-day school week for the children at school.

In English, we have read some more of the Grandpa Chatterji book and have written our own versions of an episode in the story, writing from the point of view of one of the characters. We have done some more work adding and subtracting fractions in maths.

One of our main pieces of work this week was a science afternoon when we investigated changing sounds using improvised instruments and proper musical instruments. We also did some further work on the automata that we are making in Design and Technology. We made the axle and crank mechanisms and also started making the two cam mechanisms.

In addition we had a science session on parts of the flower and their functions and PE.

In this short week, we have continued our work based on Grandpa Chatterji. We have thought about the variety of speech verbs the author uses and about the character of Grandpa Chatterji himself. We have also used our scanning skills to read quickly though all the chapters we have covered to date and pick out ideas about Indian culture that Jamila Gavin has introduced into the story.

On Monday afternoon, we had a special RE session during which we learned about the 5 Ks of Sikhism. We looked at objects that Sikhs wear in connection with the 5 Ks then used information from video to classify key ideas about these items and link the objects to their symbolic meanings and things that they remind Sikhs about.

We have started two new science topics this week, one about sound and how we hear things and the other about plants and animals. We also has two music lessons - a short session about music notation and rhythm and another in which we worked in groups to compose pieces representing Robin Hood's forest workshop. Our percussion represented the craftsmen using various tools and we changed the music appropriately when other events (e.g. it started raining or there was a passing knight) occurred.

Friday and next Monday are INSET days for the teachers.

In our first week back following our half-term holiday, we have begun a new unit of work in English, studying the book Grandpa Chatterji by Jamila Gavin. We have read the first two chapters , thought about how the family prepared for grandpa's visit, explored some of the figurative language the author uses and written diary entries from the point of view of one of the children before and after they met their grandpa for the first time.

Our maths this week has focussed on fractions, decimals and percentages. The main learning concerned ensuring that we can convert between fractions, decimals and percentages, know the relationships and can also find percentages of amounts by using this knowledge.

In music, we have listened to a range of pieces, learning to use vocabulary to describe the different musical elements we could identify. Then we played some percussion pieces together, making sure that we played rhythmically and in time with our partners. We have also begun our topic on belonging and community in the context of the Sikh religion. The thought about and discussed the groups we belong to and how other might know that we belong to these groups and we used video and text to learn some of the key beliefs of members of the Sikh faith.