In these last few months, in history, we’ve been studying about: The Crusades, Richard the Lionheart and Matilda, Stephen, Henry II and the Church in the Middle Ages.
The Crusades were a series of wars between the Christian Europeans and the Muslim Turks. They took place from 1096 to 1492.
Jerusalem was important city for all religions.
Richard the Lionheart was an excellent soldier and a famous king of England, even though he was French. He achieved the nickname Lionheart as it was said he was as brave as a lion. Richard fought a lot for England but during the Crusades he achieved nothing for his country.
Then at the at the start of February we started to learn about Matilda, who would have been the first Queen of England, but noble people like barons didn’t want a woman to rule so they made Matilda’s cousin, Stephen King. She didn’t want him to rule, so after arguing they made a deal: Stephen would rule, but after his death Matilda’s son would be king. After studying Matilda, we passed onto her son, Henry II, who managed to solve all the problems Stephen made in England.
In Geography, during these two months, we learnt about the structure of the Earth, continental drift and problems underground such as: earthquakes and volcanoes, we also started to learn about rivers and the water cycle.
We discovered about the different layers inside Earth, which are: the crust, the upper mantle and the lower mantle, the outer core and the inner core.
We learned about continental drift, discovered by Alfred Wegener, and the four main pieces of evidence he did to prove this. We looked at plate movements which cause earthquakes.
Earthquakes are extremely dangerous, the shaking through their seismic waves create a lot of disasters. Volcanoes are just as harmful as earthquakes, once they erupt, lava can flood all over streets and cities, burning many houses. Then we started to work on rivers, mostly about the a river Thames, which is the largest river in the UK.
These last two months, in science, we’ve been studying with Mr Clarke: cells, species, Carl Linnaeus and binomial nomenclature.
Cells might be boring, but M.r Clarke can make ‘boring’ fun. We know that cells are the smallest living thing on earth and that they also grow, so because of this we observed the cell growth in a diagram and noticed it took 15 minutes for a cell to actually double! There are different types of cells and some are also used in bioengineering, the process of taking tiny cells and growing them into tissues that can then be used to replace damaged tissues in people. We also learned about Carl Linnaeus, a scientist who created a system of naming plants and animals, this system is known as binomial system, where each species of plant and animal is given a genus name followed by a species. Regarding Carl Linnaeus, binomial nomenclature is important for scientists to remember millions of species and with it they are each given a unique scientific name.
In English, these last two months, Mr Clarke has been teaching us about Shakespeare, his way of writing, poetic terms, his sonnets and all about Romeo and Juliet.
Shakespeare was a great playwright and poet, he wrote 154 sonnets and 38 plays. In his sonnets he used thou, thee, thy and thine, which were Early Modern English terms.
Each line of his sonnets were written in Iambic pentameter, a measure of five feat each containing a stressed and unstressed syllable. We looked at sonnet 2,18,20,29,116 and 130.
We also learnt about Romeo and Juliet’s prologue, which was the only part of the play to use Iambic Pentameter. We identified which characters were Montagues, Capulets or Neutral. We looked at different scenes, like: Romeo being lovesick over Rosaline, Romeo and Juliet talking for the first time, the balcony scene, the fight scene and when Juliet finds out Romeo killed her cousin, Tybalt.
We also discovered that Romeo was an effeminate man because in the Middle Ages men were supposed to fight and not distract themselves with women. Romeo was more a lover than a fighter, he just killed people because he was forced to.
By Lavinia and Elisa
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