MrJennings

Our last week of school before our October half-term holidays has been something of a "test week", with short tests in reading, maths and story writing.

We did another piece of writing to our unit of work on creating well-organised paragraphs, writing about our achievements in 2016 which we subsequently improved. In maths, we were thinking about multiples and factors, also finding common multiples and common factors of pairs and sets of numbers.

We made a start on a new science topic (Forces) this week. We began by thinking about the forces we know and then thinking about "pushes" and "pulls" in a little more detail. Following that, we spent some time talking about friction before doing an experiment to investigate the grip of different types of shoes on different surfaces. The following day we wrote this experiment up in a science report. We also used this work to discuss fair testing and the importance of repeating tests to ensure the reliability of results.

On Thursday, we have a special morning in school when everyone was learning about "British Values". Year 5 was thinking about democracy and our class linked this with work done in Year 4 about life in ancient Greece. We played a simulation game in which we had to run a city-state (polis) and we did this in three ways: with a monarch, with an oligarchy and with a democracy. We reflected on how these worked and how we felt about the decisions and the decision-making. We also discussed the development of democracy in the United Kingdom and the importance of involvement. In the afternoon on Thursday, we made clay pots ready to decorate with the designs we have been preparing in art.

We finished the week by making a start on our design and technology project - which will involve making a woven panel. We measured, marked and sawed some lengths of wood which we will use to make our weaving frames and we also produced some design ideas as part of the planning for our panels.

We have developed our work on writing good paragraphs, by working on both fiction writing by writing about major rivers of the world and about ourselves. The focus has been on giving the paragraphs helpful opening sentences, varying the structure of the next sentences by using different types of words to start the following sentences and creating a "summing up" or "rounding off" sentence to end the paragraph.

In maths, our work has developed our mental arithmetic skills (practicing methods of mental addition and subtraction) and revised written (column) methods also of addition and subtraction.

We had an extended art session looking at the ceramic art of Clarice Cliff and creating designs in her palette and style, and making comparisons with the work of Bodil Manz, the Danish ceramicist. We have also done some more geography work, starting to think about tourism in the Lake District.

In addition, we had our weekly science lesson about Earth in Space, two PE sessions and finished the week with an introduction to playing the tin whistle.

This has, effectively, been a short week for us in class. Friday was an INSET day, so there was no school and, on Thursday, we had an educational visit to the National Space Centre in Leicester.

The National Space Centre proved to be an exciting and worthwhile venue for a visit to help develop our understanding of ideas linked to our science work on the Earth, Sun and Moon and to provide experiences which could not be addressed in the classroom. There were many practical activities to try out and lots of information to find.

Another special event in our week was our school harvest festival. All the year groups gave a short presentation and our class, together with our parallel Year 5 class, used the story of the Little Red Hen as the heart of ours.

In the rest of the week, we did a little more computer programming, completed our unit of work on the farm industry of the Lake District, thought about strategies for mental addition and subtraction in maths and started learning how to write more well-crafted non-fiction paragraphs in English.