An Epic Week

Good evening,

We are well into the half term now and the children have all settled down and are working hard.

English

In English this week we have been looking at more Greek myths and, following on from the story of the Trojan War, we have been summarising The Odyssey. This is the story of Odysseus’ eventful return journey to Ithica after defeating the Trojans and rescuing Helen.

Even in shortened form, the tale is quite long and is broken down into several adventures. The children have been attempting to summaries each part into just a few sentences so that they can write a newspaper report about the events.

If you are interested in the story, the video series below is very watchable.

Music

In Music, we have started to learn the classic Bon Jovi song, Livin on a Prayer. We have sung the song a few times and have been using glockenspiels to play the tune. If your child has instrument lessons in school, they will also be learning to play the notes. The final recording in a few weeks should be spectacular and will be posted on the blog.

Science

Our work this week has been looking at the mind-boggling size of the solar system.

We investigated this by using toilet roll and giving the scale of 1 sheet to 20,000,000 km. The sun and the eight planets were then drawn at the correct distance from one another and the whole roll laid out, with each child being a planet. Gusty winds blowing the school toilet paper around made the task tricky but the children gained a good insight as to the dimentions and scale of our solar system.

The following website is a good demonstration of the size (if you have a lot of time to spare).

http://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html

Have a great weekend.

Mr Beevers, Mr Hemming, Mrs Kroon, Ms Howells and the rest of the Year 5 team.