Fraction pictures, Friendship Ninjas and Victorian Prisons

A wonderful variety of learning occurred in Class 5 this week.

In maths, we have continued building our confidence in working with fractions. So far we have gone over simplifying, ordering, converting mixed and improper fractions as well as beginning to develop our skills in adding and subtracting fractions. We were able to use fraction builders to help us secure our understanding. We also had great fun in early morning work having a go at playing a negative number game, and discussed how adding and subtracting negative numbers affects a number.

In English, we have started looking at the features of detective stories to help us in developing our own. We learnt new vocabulary such as 'red herrings' and 'alibis'. At the end of the week we had a chance to learn a mystery story on each of our tables and act them out in front of the class.

In gymnastics, Mrs Martin has continued to help us develop our gymnastic skills by working on paired balances, here are just a few of the poses we managed to control!

In theme this week, we have nearly reached the end of our crime and punishment topic by looking at the Victorian period. On Monday we had a chance to look at an online database of Victorian prisoners, and learnt how to use the search function to help us scour the 1000s of prisoners to find the culprit of a crime! The website can be found here: http://vcp.e2bn.org/

On Friday Mrs Martin introduced us to what life was like in Victorian prisons. She took on the role of strict prison warden and we recreated some of the boring tasks that prisoners were forced to do. We had a go at unpicking rope, carrying heavy objects around, stepping up on benches as well as walking with our arms outstretched holding ropes - and all in silence! Of course we only had to perform these tasks for a few minutes, it must have been awful for Victorian prisoners to have to do them for hours!

We completed this week with our homework share, and this week it was especially exciting as we had all been friendship ninjas for the week! We finally got to expose the random acts of kindness that we had done for our friends, family and teachers this week. Hopefully some of the values that we learnt by doing this homework will continue long into the future.

Next week we begin assessing how much we have learnt over this term, so we can start celebrating the skills we have managed to develop.

Mrs Crawley

All aboard the 'friend'ship!

This week has been friendship week, and a good reminder of what we need to remember to do to be a good friend. We had a lot of time to reflect and discuss the issues that often come up between friends, and reminded ourselves of what qualities we have and need to remember to be a good friend.

We created our own 'Keys to Friendship' based on these ideas.

In English, we had the chance to create and design our own books for younger children. We thought about the issues we faced with making and keeping friends when we were little and based our stories around these. We created our own success criteria of what we needed to include to make our stories appealling to younger children, and our KS2 teachers were pleased that after years of nagging we found it really difficult to write without joining up our letters so as not to confuse our younger audience!

The highlight of the week was definitely when we got to go into Class 1 and 2 to test out our books on younger children. We had so much fun reading our stories to them!

In maths we are still focusing on fractions. We had a chance to practise simplifying fractions as well as converting mixed and improper. We still need some more work on this though, and will continue to look at this into next week.

On Thursday we had our class museum, and our parents had a chance to look at some of the learning we have done so far this term. We also waved Bon Voyage to our Viking ships as they sailed home with us, making room for other decorations we made need to put up in a few weeks time...

Friday was friendship day! We had a chance to work with children from other classes with the challenge to redesign our playtimes. We had some great ideas, and most importantly teachers and TAs were impressed with how responsible we were looking after our younger pupils in the school. Watch this space as to whether any of our ideas will be used in redesigning our outdoor areas...

For homework this week, we have overlooked our usual maths and spellings for something far friendlier! Find out next week how it went!

Mrs Crawley

Here, there and everywhere!

We have done so much learning in Class 5 this week, and not all of it just in the classroom either! Maybe I should start at the beginning...

On Monday Year 6 had a chance to participate in a multi-school music festival at Copford Primary. We had great fun learning the songs and experiencing singing in canon with 100 other people.

Meanwhile Year 5s enjoyed solving a murder mystery by working through maths problems with Mrs Sibley. Poor Mrs Sibley has been ill for the rest of the week - we obviously worked her too hard!

Monday afternoon we came back together and looked at Tudor crimes and punishments. We enjoyed looking at sources of evidence and identifying stocks, racks and ducking stools.

Tuesday we introduced the classic narrative poem 'The Highwayman' in English. We have been working hard on our reading skills all week, discussing language, tense choices and especially working on inference to help us work out the relationships between characters.

After a relatively straightforward Tuesday, we moved on to more excitement on Wednesday, when we started the day by practising our chopstick movement! As well as helping us with eating Chinese food, this was also a great warm-up for our handwriting muscles.

By Wednesday afternoon, it was time to go out on another adventure! This time our maths team went to participate in the Young Mathematicians Award run by Nrich. We were given some tricky challenges and had to investigate them together, showing teamwork as well as logical thinking.

Meanwhile the rest of Year 6 started off our Science topic of electrical circuits by showing what they already know. Over the next few weeks we will build on this knowledge by finding out about circuit symbols and resistance.

On Thursday we continued our gymnastic skills by practising skipping games. There was a lot of timing and teamwork that went into this lesson!

By the afternoon Wendy, a local historian from the village, came in to tell the whole school about the role of the British Legion and explained where all the money we collect from selling poppies goes.

On Friday, Year 6 went to the Fordham War Memorial to represent the school in a service and two minute silence. We all enjoyed having a chance to be a flag-bearer!

In the afternoon it was time to make the last trip of the week, this time to the Lexden Squash Courts, where our squash team got to try out their racket skills from last half term on a real squash court.

And that was our week! What a lot of travelling our class has done! Let's try and stay a little more sedentary next week shall we?

Mrs Crawley