MrJennings

Our focus in maths this week has moved on to fractions with our main learning being about identifying equivalent fractions, comparing fractions and understanding fractions. We have used fraction walls, created our own and converted fractions from one denomination to another as well as showing relationships between fractions by drawing diagrams.

We have started a study of the famous poem The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes this week. We have read the poem and heard it performed in different ways. To help us understand the story, we have done some dictionary work to find the meaning of various pieces of vocabulary and have also thought about the meaning of some of the similes and metaphors. Over the last two days we have tracked the actions of the major characters though the narrative and then though about how the poet wanted the reader to view them.

In maths, we have focused on methods of addition and subtraction, practicing our computation and learning about how to make good decisions when considering whether to use mental or written processes to find answers to questions.

We have also made good progress in our work on the life of a river, making notes and writing paragraphs about the upper and middle courses of rivers. We finished the week by starting an art topic in which we will be developing a piece of art based on Aboriginal stick painting. We learned about the origins of this style of work, the colour palette and some of the traditional symbols that Aboriginal artists used.

We have spent some time this week learning some grammar and trying to relate this to our speaking and writing. We have covered determiners, different types of nouns and some aspects of pronouns (beginning to learn about subjective and objective pronouns).

In maths, we have focused on addition and subtraction. We have been developing fluency when doing mental calculations and checking that we can compute more difficult sums correctly with written methods, but the main work was helping us make sensible decisions about when to use a mental or a written method.

We started a new RE topic in which we are thinking about the lives of people who are widely regarded as being inspirational to others and we also finished our science unit of work on forces.

A major piece of work for us this week was a new section of learning in our geography study of rivers. We watched a video and read a text about the different stages in the "life" of a river. We then made notes about river sources and the upper course of rivers. As a class, we modelled writing a good non-fiction paragraph about sources of rivers before starting our own paragraphs about the upper course of rivers.

During this short week which has begun our Spring Term learning, we have finished off some aspects of our Autumn Term Design and Technology project by completing instructions and writing a report and reflection of what we did and made. We also had several science lessons on our Forces topic. We considered and learned about forces acting on moving objects (including gravity, friction, air resistance and water resistance) and did experimental investigations (looking at the speed at which objects dropped through water) to help us understand the principles of streamlining.

In maths, we learned more about Roman numerals, converting numbers between Roman and Arabic notation and also revisited some work on negative numbers which we primarily covered before Christmas.

We finished the week with a further piece of work for our Faith and the Arts RE topic. We looked at different representations of the Hindu deity, Ganesha, making notes about the characteristic features present in all the images and learning some rules of Hindu iconography. We also learned about some different Hindu symbols before creating our own pictures of Ganesha (or making a badge to represent him).