MrJennings

This week has been our Arts Week at school.

We have taken "India" as our theme and the majority of our activities have been linked to this during the week. We have continued reading our "Grandpa Chatterji" book in English, thinking about the aspects of Indian culture addressed in the story and thinking about the  development of the characters and some techniques used by the author. We also read some "Readers Theater" plays based on traditional Indian folk stories.

Bhangra drumming and Bollywood dancing were two of the exciting activities of the week. Both of these were provided by visiting specialist teachers. We also studied some traditional drumming rhythms in class and improvised on top of these.

We also did a range of art activities. These including sketching, creating rangoli patterns and developing designs based on the theme of the peacock which is a national animal of India.

This has been our "test week" at school with our "end of year" tests in English (reading and spelling) and maths. However, there has been plenty of time for other activities too.

In our RE topic, we have learned about the Langar meal, kitchen and hall, thinking about how this activity reflects the beliefs of Sikh people. We have done some more "sketchup" graphics work in ICT and studied flowers in art and science - drawing flowers as well as dissecting and identifying the main parts of a flower.

We have also started a study of the novel, Grandpa Chatterji, in advance of our "India" theme of work for next week's Arts Week.

We have continued our learning about author's techniques in story writing this week. This has included thinking about ways in which writers build tension and suspense so we have discussed how "unanswered questions" may be built into the text and ways that information can be withheld from the reader as well as the use of "empty words", short sentences and the feelings of the characters.

Our work in maths has included using a range of number, decimal and fraction scales, calculating with fractions and percentages and converting units of measurement. One of the main areas of new learning has been multiplying with fractions, including multiplying mixed numbers.

We have started a new unit of learning in RE this week in which we will be finding out about Sikhism. We began by thinking about the groups and communities we belong to and how others might know that we belong to these. Then, while watching a BBC video about Sikhism, we made some notes about some basic facts connected to the religion including the meaning of some key terms and information such as the name of their place of worship and their holy book. After this we thought about the Ik Onkar, an important Sikh prayer, and discussed translations of this (considering which versions of different lines seemed most meaningful to us). Last, this week, we read a story about a Prince and a Guru and wrote about what we thought the Guru wanted the Prince to learn from his teaching.

We have had a grammar and punctuation focus in English this week, thinking about sentence structures including adverbial clauses, adverbs of probability and the punctuation of direct speech. We have also done some more work on story structure. In maths, we have been developing our abilities to use bar models to represent different maths problems (including writing problems to match different model structures). We have also worked on addition and subtraction of fractions.

We completed our science topic on materials and their properties this week and we had an end-of-unit review test to check our learning. In geography we did some atlas work, checking our knowledge of the location of the continents of the world, the oceans and major seas of the world and the seas around the British Isles. We had a dance session in PE and started to make some elements of the framework for our automata in Design and Technology.