Year 5 immerse themselves in Take One Picture

Year 5 have been using Roelandt Savery’s ‘Orpheus’ as an inspiration for all of their work this week. In English, the classes have been creating their own Greek dictionary, investigating words in our language that originated from Greek. The dodo was frequently painted by Savery and the children have used their non-fiction skills learnt this term to investigate animals that face extinction today. The painting has been used to investigate fractions, percentages and scale in Maths. The water birds in the painting were taken as inspiration for floating and sinking investigations in Science. Newton Meters were used to measure the upthrust in water. The children have been creating graphical models of Orpheus and the animals in ICT.

History has been ‘Take One Picture: Take Two Myths’ and we have looked at the myth of Orpheus and the Mayan creation myth, comparing how animals are represented in each. We have been thinking about what the Mayan myth may look like if recreated in the style of ‘Orpheus’. Map skills have been put to use in Geography, as the children have created maps of the Underworld! Everyone has enjoyed the opportunity to use the dictionaries in French to look up new and exciting adjectives to describe the animals in Savery’s paintings.

A few of the many facts the children have learnt this week include:

Finn: ‘There are 6 rivers in the underworld and below it was a very dark layer where all the villains went.’

Lucy: ‘I learnt the story of Orpheus and I found it very gruesome’.