During thelast week of our topic we have been learning about the destruction of the world's rainforests. We have thought about why they are in danger, why it is so important to save them, and some ideas of how to save them!
As we are now expert film-makers, we decided to make some "Save the Rainforest" news stories/adverts.
We all had a fabulous time at our "Jungle Day" last Friday, and all looked fabulous in our jungle explorers gear!
During the day we worked in groups to plan, film and edit our own films. We used our school nature area as our filming location-it made a great rainforest for the day!
We also made our own cheesy snakes, and looked at some tropical fruits, which we made into fruit kebabs. Emre had also baked some delicious monkey cakes for the whole class! It worked out well because after filming in the sunshine we were ready for a delicious jungle picnic!
Here are our jungle films, and a slides how of "behind the scenes" photos from our day!
In literacy this week we have been busy reading, planning and creating acrostic poems.
For our own poems we used either the word "Jungle", or "Rainforest." First we thought of as many words and phrases as we could to describe the rainforest-using everything we have learnt so far. Then we used these ideas to form lines for our poems. Once we were happy with our first drafts we wrote them again on special Jungle paper! Finally we recorded ourselves reading our poems, so that people can enjoy them at home!
Let us know what you think of our Rainforest/Jungle Poems...
Last week in literacy we were inspired by the book "Where the Forest meets the Sea" by Jeannie Baker. It is all about a boys real, and imaginary journey through the Australian rainforest.
We really enjoyed the book, and found it very though provoking, especially the ending where the boy wonders what will happen to the rainforest in the future.
We decided to focus on using all our senses to imagine and describe our own journey through the rainforest.
As we were so impressed by the illustrations in the original book, we decided to use the ipads to create our own picture books, with words and illustrations. They took a while to complete, but they were definitely worth it!
Click on the names below to read that child's book. We are very proud of our work, so please let us know what you think!
Today in maths we decided to use the school grounds to practise our geometry skills. We looked carefully at our school building, field and playground, in order to find examples of:
Symmetry
2D and 3D shapes
Right Angles
Once we found an interesting view we took a photo using the ipads, and recorded our explanations of the geometry features.
When we got back to the classroom we watched our recordings, and discussed what we had done well, and what we need to practise more! Each group chose one recording to share on the blog. Here is the link to our favourite recordings!
For the last few weeks of the year we are lucky to have an athletics coach coming in to work with us on Thursdays. We had our first session last week, and had a great time!
In maths this year we have done lots of different types of measurements, including:
Length
Direction
Mass
Angle
Capacity
Perimeter
While the weather wasn't too bad, we decided to practice our measuring. We went outside for a measuring scavenger hunt. We had to find things that were a specific length, height, perimeter, mass, number of right angles or even faced a specific compass direction.
In art this term we have been doing lots of different weaving.
On Monday we were lucky to have an expert weaver come in to work with us. With his help we created some fabulous fish, just by weaving willow branches!
This week at school we are having a "Culture Week." Each class will be learning about a different country. Ours is India!
To start off the week we were lucky to have a Zumba session with Mrs Jenkin. We found out that Zumba was created in Columbia, but uses dance elements from many different countries, including India!
We all really enjoyed ourselves, and had some fabulous moves, as you can see in the video...
Thanks again to Mrs Jenkin for a great experience!
At the end of our London topic I challenged the children to choose an app on the ipads, and use it to show me what they had learnt! The results were very creative. Here are a few of them...
For their Learning Log tasks children were asked to create an advert to encourage people to visit London. The results were all brilliant! Some children chose to do this by creating videos. Here are some for you to enjoy!
On Friday afternoon we decided to make video guides to London using Microsoft Photostory.
First we searched for images of London on Google, and saved them. Next we imported our favourite images to Photostory, we sequenced them and added some captions. Finally, some groups recorded their own narration to explain the sights of the city!
Today has been a busy day on our Twitter account. We have been learning all about London, so we set ourselves a mission to share as many facts as possible in a day! We did pretty well!
Here is a link to show you all the facts we managed to tweet. It is even more impressive as we managed to do this as well as all our normal classroom activities!
During our topic time on Friday we were lucky to get the chance to look at a real fireman's uniform. We enjoyed looking at the different features of the uniform and considering how they would help the fire brigade do their jobs effectively!
After exploring the uniform we went on to set up our own science investigations into how waterproof different materials are. We had some surprising results which made us reconsider our definitions of "waterproof." We also decided that we should do some more investigations next week to find out more about waterproof materials.
