What an immense week for 5P! Amongst lots of glorious learning, we had a visit and training from an actor at the Globe to help us with our Macbeth performance. We thoroughly enjoyed Nick’s visit and really appreciated his help in bringing our production to life.

Amongst the many activities to further immerse our selves in Macbeth, we practiced sketching portraits, with the end result being witch-like beings. Initially we explored the appropriate placement of facial features when drawing portraits. We then used our new skills to draw a portrait of our table partner. The next layer of this lesson involved the children transforming their table partner in to a witch in their final portrait drawing. I am so proud of each of the children for delving into their imaginations and creating wildly impressive witch portraits. Here are a few!

This week we began to learn French! As a class, 5P love languages and very quickly got to grips with colours in French. We practised our pronunciation and fed back to each other in pairs on our strengths when reciting colours in French.

We have nearly completed a full class read through of the entire Macbeth script. We are getting to grips with the meaning of the script and any abstract vocabulary. This will ensure the cast fully understands the play and importantly, understand the character’s emotions. It is brilliant to see the children reading their scripts during break and lunchtime. Next week, will begin to combine our knowledge of the script with stage directions and acting.

Other highlights of our week included RE and Science. In RE, we learnt about the importance of the Kaaba in Mecca. The children went on to draw their interpretations of the Kaaba using oil pastels. During our Science lesson, we further explored different states of matter, developing a greater awareness of their particle formations and properties!

Our week in 5P has been filled with learning and excitement. We have continued to learn about place value, working with concepts such as the power of 10 and handling numbers up to 1 million. The class continue to grow in confidence handling roman numerals, using the system to write the short date in Maths each day.

Next week we will continue to explore relative clauses and begin to write our letter as Macbeth to Lady Macbeth. As a class we have shown an incredible enthusiasm for widening our writers toolkit and including emotions of characters more frequently. Often this can be done using fronted adverbials.

In PE, we recapped our hockey skills from previous years and began learning to dribble the ball whilst evading defenders. 5P were fantastic at controlling the hockey ball with their sticks, whilst also running at a fast pace!

Each child now has a role in our Macbeth production. Some children will have multiple roles within the cast – how exciting! From next week, we start to learn our lines for our roles. Children taking their scripts home to read can practice using expression, both vocally and facially, when reading their lines.

During History we explored Shakespeare’s impact on modern society, through areas such as tourism, culture and language. 5P have created individual posters boasting their incredible drawings of things, such as the Globe and W.Shakespeare himself, combined with facts and information on his impact on society.

The children thoroughly enjoyed the PSHE lesson where we had several class discussions about what mental health is and how we can help others, and ourselves, to be mentally healthy. 5P in particular enjoyed the practice of Mindful Hearing and asked for recommendations for them to do some at home. There are apps available, we have been practicing using this link in class: https://soundcloud.com/susankaisergreenland/mindful-hearing

Looking forward to another week full of learning!