MrJennings

We have continued our work in English thinking about aspects of story writing. This week, we have focused on different styles of paragraphs - descriptive paragraphs, speech paragraphs and action paragraphs. We have tried to write opening paragraphs for stories using these different styles, looking at examples for the story of Cinderella before writing our own openings for a story about Humpty Dumpty and then one about Jack and Jill.

In maths, we have been working on our understanding of decimal numbers. This has included understanding place value of tenths and hundredths, reading decimal numbers correctly, ordering them and rounding them to the nearest tenth and the nearest whole number. At the end of the week we moved on to start working on mental addition and subtraction strategies.

We have spent a good amount of time on our geography topic this week. We have learned more about forestry and how the provision of more forests affects the landscape and some different groups of people. We have also learned about the activities of hill farmers throughout the year on Lakeland farms. After finding out about some of the changes that have occurred over the last sixty years in numbers of farm workers and numbers of animals in the area, we thought about the impact of this on the landscape.

At the end of the day on Friday, we had a look at the script for our Year 5 harvest presentation which we will be doing next week.

In English this week, we have thought about how authors show and develop characters in their stories. We looked at how Philip Ridley showed how "Grandpa" behaved and spoke in unpleasant ways to create an impression, in the reader's mind, of his personality. We then thought about how some stereotypical characters would behave, the ways they speak and the sorts of things they say. Finally, we wrote an episode of the Three Bears, portraying Baby Bear as a very naughty child.

Our maths work has focused on multiplying and dividing numbers by 10, 100 and 1000 (including decimal numbers) and understanding the effect of these processes. We then moved on to apply our knowledge and ability to do this in converting units of measurement (e.g. converting kilometres to metres, metres to centimetres and vice versa)

We have spent several sessions on our geography topic about the Lake District this week, learning something about National Parks in the UK, their locations and relating local parks to country parks and national parks. We also started a unit about forestry in the Lake District in which we thought about the different jobs in the industry and some of the knowledge that a forester must have.

We had two PE sessions, a science session about the planets in our solar system and finished the week with art and a ukulele lesson. Also this week, we completed our Class Agreement and selected a Class Target for the half term.

We have had a good start to the term.

In the first few days after the holidays, we did a range of writing activities (to check up on what we had remembered and could do after our six-week break) and we also did some addition, subtraction, multiplication and division sums (starting with very easy calculations and moving to challenging ones).

One of the main units of work at the beginning of term has been our "Desert Island" topic, which has helped us think about different aspects of PSHE, including ways to help keep health, taking responsibility, making rules and making decisions in groups as well as some design activities. We enjoyed making shelters in the school garden.

In English, we have read and discussed several short books, including Dinner Ladies Don't Count by Bernard Ashley and The Hooligan's Shampoo by Philip Ridley. We have done some comprehension work and written some expanded noun phrases in the style of Philip Ridley's shopkeeper.

In addition, we have had two music sessions on the ukulele, tried some "Hour of Code" programming on the computer and started looking at some of the work on Bodil Manz in art.