Year 5

Heathrow Primary School, Harmondsworth Lane, Sipson, West Drayton, Middlesex, UB7 0JQ

020 8759 1628

office@heathrowprimaryschool.co.uk

Year 5

SUMMER

This term in history, the Year 5 children looked at the Ancient Mayan civilisation. We started buy exploring the reasons why the Maya topic is on the curriculum, children learnt how the Mayan civilization grew so strong when the odds against it were so huge. Through multiple lessons, children devoted their time to exploring the characteristics features of the Mayan society and comparing it with the state of Britain at the same time. Children also developed their use of evidence, as they were asked to work out how we can be so sure about what life was like for the Maya a thousand years ago. We then concluded the topic with an open-ended enquiry which challenged children to work collaboratively to create their own plausible answer to the riddle of why the Mayan civilization came to such an abrupt end.

SPRING

In the Spring term, the year 5 students had a chance to be historians. In this topic, we were looking at the Ancient Greeks. Each lesson students had the opportunity to look at primary sources and from this use their inference skills to assess what this source told them about the Ancient Greeks as a civilisation. They thoroughly enjoyed acting out the Battle of Marathon and deciding which Ancient city (Sparta or Athens) would be the best to live. We compared democracy in this time to democracy now and compared the role of women. Finally children were able to use all this knowledge to infer why Athens was such a powerful city during this time.