We have been continuing our research on China by looking at Chinese Fans. We discovered that these date back to the 7th century and were often used to tell a story or a poem. We used fine details in our painting to recreate the type of images you would typically find on a Chinese fan.

 

As part of our research we have been analysing data linked to China’s population over the last 60 years. During our I.C.T. sessions we have been investigating ways to use Excel spreadsheets to collate information as well as investigating how we can then use and interpret the information we have collected. We learned about using certain tools in Excel and there are ones that allow us to create charts and graphs. We thought this was extremely useful so when some of our maths groups were investigating time to the one hundredth of a second we thought we could apply these skills in our numeracy work as well. We had a great time creating activities and recording the times, so much so that we then continued the learning in P.E. 

   

Our drama lessons have continued to focus on China. We have been learning about improvisation, once we were in our drama ‘families’ Mrs Norman gave us a different scenario to act out, imagining our family was living in China. It was a lot of fun to see the different characters in the family emerge. When we swapped with P6B, Mr Atkinson taught us some numbers in Mandarin.

Our writing this week has been focusing on poetry. We used basic animal descriptions to create short funny poems about animals. We set ourselves the target of including similes, metaphors, onomatopoeia and alliteration. It was a lot more challenging than we thought!

We are still inspired from our author visit last week. We were so lucky to have a visit from author Alex Nye who wrote the book Chill that we all studied in class. Alex came to us to talk about her inspiration to be a writer as well as sharing some real life photographs of her inspiration for Chill. It was great to hear her stories, as well as being able to share some of our own ideas. She thought that Danny’s story was great! At the end of her talk we were able to get our books signed by the author, as well as being able to purchase some of her newer books. We now all have some holiday reading!