Year 5 Blog

We have been engrossed in writing our play script versions of Odysseus’ encounter with the fearsome Cyclops this week, and greatly enjoyed acting some of these out today! We impressed each other with the ways in which we used stage directions to bring our characters to life and moved about our ‘stage’ too.

In maths lessons, we have continued to work with translation and reflection across coordinate planes. We’re now able to tackle this in all four quadrants!

We have also been getting creative with clay to design and make pottery in the style of Ancient Green amphora vases – now we’re looking forward to painting these as soon as they’re dry…

We have spent a lot of time wrestling with the story of Odysseus’ struggle with the cyclops (from Homer’s ‘The Odyssey’) during our English lessons this week, and have begun creating excellent play scripts inspired by this. We have all had to think really hard about the most important events in the story and have carried out a lot of work in the creation of interesting settings and descriptions – using stage directions to help us.

In maths lessons, we have worked well with negative numbers and can confidently order and solve problems with these. This has enabled us to make a great start of our unit of work around coordinates too; some of us have already begun making use of all four quadrants for translation!

We have hit the ground running this week and got stuck into our new learning about the Ancient Greeks! We enjoyed getting outside to create a scaled timeline of history from the present day back to the Hellenic Age on Tuesday, and have since been working with extracts from Homer’s classic text: The Odyssey. Through topic sessions, we have started drawing comparisons between ancient and modern Greece.

Next week we will develop our learning about negative numbers (again, applying this to scales) and will begin creating play scripts to bring Odysseus’ epic journey to life.