MrJennings

This has been our "Olympic Week" at school - in place of our usual "Arts Week". Each class has had a number of special Olympics/Brazil themed activities and these seem to have been much enjoyed.

We had a samba drumming session in which everyone was introduced to some different types of drums used in Brazilian Samba music and we all had the chance to have a go on at least two different types of instrument. We also had a Brazilian dance session in which we were able to try some different forms of dance from South America and learned something of the history of dance in Brazil.

On Thursday, we had a PE session with our parallel Year 5 class when we went to the school field and tested ourselves on running, throwing and jumping events and, on Friday, we did some painting. We also wrote stories about experiencing being part of an Olympic event.

This has been our "end of year" test week at school. We have done a reading test and a maths test (which had three parts). In addition to this, we completed our Grandpa Chatterji work by watching a film version of the story. This allowed us to discuss changes made to the story to make it suitable for the media and think about how the director tried to replicate effects that Jamila Gavin produced in her prose. We also completed a character study of Grandpa Leicester.

Our science this week focused included work on human development (thinking about human growth) and involved the drawing and interpretation of line graphs comparing the heights of girls and boys from the age of 2 to 18. We also did more on reproduction in flowering plants, learning about insect pollination and fertilisation.

One of the teachers at school completed the London Marathon this year, raising money for a school in Africa. This week, the children in each class ran laps of the playground so that the pupils in each class jointly ran the 26.22 miles distance. The children were also sponsored, raising money for the same school.

We finished the week with some more Design and Technology.

We have continued our literature topic based on Grandpa Chatterji this week, working on various reading skills (particularly prediction) and continuing our focus on the full punctuation of speech. Our maths has covered work on fractions, percentages and place value. This has included simplifying fractions and converting them to hundredths (and thus to percentages), finding percentages of quantities and multiplying and dividing by 10, 100 and 1000.

In history, we finished some work on Nottingham and why it became a town before the Norman invasion and learned about the changes affecting the settlement as it was controlled in term by Saxons and Vikings in the last two centuries of the first millennium. Our science has focused on the life cycle of human beings, thinking in particular about the changes that take place soon after birth up to puberty. We finished the week with some DT, making the axles and cams for our automata.

We have continued our English work based around Grandpa Chatterji, concentrating on an English skills approach and raising awareness of English grammar and punctuation with a view to improving our proofreading skills. One of the main issues this week has been the writing of direct speech and the use of commas. We also did some reading skills work on Tuesday.

In maths, we have focused on fractions - learning how to multiply fractions, including mixed numbers, by whole numbers and having a brief introduction to multiplying one proper fraction by another. We also did some work on place value and decimals.

We spent some time on our science topic this week, thinking about the parts of a plant and their functions before learning about the parts of a flower. We learned the names of these parts and then drew a flower in its complete and dissected forms. In addition, we produced a slideshow to illustrate the life cycle of a frog.