Naturally, Ancient Greek Day has occupied most of our thoughts this week.

It was very successful, and as we said to your children at the end of the day, the stars of the show are not the organiser, the staff or the parent helpers.  The stars are the children themselves, because if they do not throw themselves into it, it can all fall a little bit flat.  One thing that we can always guarantee from current Year Five is that they will throw themselves into anything, and have a real energetic go at anything we throw at them.

It is why we love working with them.

So this week their enthusiasm was channeled into a range of Greek town square activities, reflecting some of the trades they might have encountered – oil crushers, mosaic makers, scribes, carvers and several more.  Each stall was overseen by a master or mistress (thank you everyone!) and there were some really beautiful creations to take home.

Throughout the morning, we were informed of news and events from the period – ‘The Spartans have gathered a mighty army…’  ‘We should be able to outnumber them…’ and we had to react accordingly.

The afternoon brought news that our warriors had overwhelmed the enemy and that a huge feast, with dancing and theatre, was called for.  We were regaled with Poseidon’s sea dance, and two plays recounting the tales of Agamemnon, and Prometheus and Pandora.  Everyone took part and there were some wonderful performances.

Yesterday we took some time reflecting on the day, and the children were given a free choice of recount activity.  There were newspaper reports, poems, and a fair number of posters illustrating the main events of the day.  The level of recall and retained information was testament to the format and the way it was delivered.  The company we hire is called Off the Page and they are consistently very good.

Earlier in the week we got the alternative endings to the P&P story finished, with a variety of ways in which Zeus punished Epimetheus – mainly by sending him the lovely Pandora, who inevitably turned out to be a bit too inquisitive for her own good.  Not a single alternative ending finished with the box remaining closed and the world being a happier place.  She just couldn’t resist.

More basketball this afternoon, majoring on shooting.  PSHE continued the discussion of basic household economics, focusing on spending money online.  A fair bit of learning for the teachers here, with multiple horror stories of buying expensive in-game enhancements (with real money), and forgetting to cancel costly monthly subscriptions.

Maths saw increasingly complex multiplication problems – taking a whole number and multiplying it by a unit fraction, a non-unit fraction and then by a mixed number.  Lots of pizza and cake examples – if you are going to give all 11 people at your party one and one third of a pizza each, how much will that cost at Dominos? (Answer:  a lot!).

Cryptography this week was looking at types of cipher.  We started with the Caesar cipher, which involves shifting of the alphabet by a certain number of offset letters.  Coded messages were sent.  Some were successfully decoded.

Next week we will be having a bit of a SPaG focus on complex sentences – sentences linked together with conjunctions – and finishing off the fractions topic.

Have a great weekend.

Y5 Team