Our girls in Year 5 are very excited about their learning this term: we are beginning with a topic on the Renaissance and will be looking particularly at some of the scientific inventions and discoveries that occurred during this period.
The pupils have drawn timelines of the main events of the Renaissance period and will now be focusing on important figures from the time, including Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Galileo.
In Art, the girls have enjoyed looking at the differences between Mediaeval and Renaissance paintings, and the girls will now be practising drawing and painting in perspective themselves! We will also be visiting the Fitzwilliam Museum to take a look at some of the Renaissance paintings that are exhibited there.
Even the Year 5 Music and Science lessons have a Renaissance twist to them at the moment. The girls have been studying the style of music from the Renaissance period and a number of composers from the time. In Science, the group has been learning about forces, including gravity and air resistance – and of course gravity was discovered by Sir Isaac Newton during the Renaissance. Here is an example of one of the parachutes the girls have been experimenting with.
After half term Year 5 will begin to learn about space, alongside some work in History on Galileo and Copernicus and their representations of the Solar System. We will be visiting the Institute of Astronomy here in Cambridge and sending our own shuttles into space at the National Space Centre! The girls are undoubtedly looking forward to encountering a few aliens along the way (in their Creative Writing and Art work especially) so they will have to know their way around the planets very well indeed.