Year 5- ancient Greece

Year 5- Ancient Greece

Project Overview

This half term, Year 5 have been learning about ancient Greece.

The children started off by creating a timeline and learning about the different civilisations of ancient Greece and used their geography skills to locate Greece and Crete on a map. The children then went on to discover what life was like for the ancient Greeks, focusing on how life might have differed for men and women and the rich and poor. We looked at the battle of marathon, when the Greeks beat the Persians, and the children recreated the battle using the same tactics. They then conducted their own research on Greek gods and goddesses.

In writing, we continued the topic of ancient Greece by looking at Greek myths. First, the children read and acted out the story of Theseus and the minotaur before planning and writing their own narrative retelling the story.  We were really impressed with how well the children used literary devices and dialogue to move their stories on and the work produced was of a very high quality with lots of action and detail. Next, Year 5 read the myth- the 12 labours of Heracles. They went on to create their own (very imaginative and quite scary) thirteenth labours and write an independent story. We finished writing by focusing on the myth of Daedalus and Icarus, where children created a persuasive letter to convince Daedalus to move to Crete and build a palace for King Minos and finally, created an advert for their very own pair of magical wings. 

To end the half term, we had an ancient Greek day. Children were encouraged to come to school dressed in ancient Greek attire. We spent the day enjoying a carousal of activities such as capture the flag (with ancient Greek battle tactics), creating our very own clay Greek vases, food tasting some different Greek foods and ending with three performances of ancient Greek myths in our class assemblies. We were really proud of how hard the children worked to write and perform the myths on their own.