Start of Pole Apart!

Our children have started their new text 'Poles Apart'. Mr White welcomes some lost penguins from the South Pole, and he offers to help them get back but takes them on a world tour first! We also enhance our main text with lots of linked texts for the children to enjoy!

The children have used this text to influence their learning about our world. They have been exploring maps/globes and what they show us. We have had a look at land and sea and how this can be displayed on a map. Some maps have 'coloured' so we discussed this showed us the different countries in our world! The children had lots of opportunities to explore our world maps in various ways:

internet/books/pictures/drawings/globes/IPADs etc 

The children explored how to change the colour blue to a lighter/darker shade in order to paint their own world maps, with the shades of blue they wish. Can they use the same method to change the shades of green too?

We have enhanced their role play area with a travel agent, where the children can book you in for your holidays. They use travel brochures as well as online platforms for inspiration. 

They also explored ice. What is it? What does it feel like? What happens when we leave it out? Can we speed any process up? How? Lots of scientific questions to be had!

Mr White took the penguins to China, where they were celebrating and preparing for Lunar New Year. We learnt a little bit about what that was, how it was celebrated and similarities and differences to celebrations we already know or celebrate ourselves. 
 We had food tasting sessions of typical Chinese foods and made pictogram graphs by voting, what foods were our favourites and why. We looked at Chinese numbers and compared them to ours, we enjoyed writing them too. We read the text The Great Race in our class book, as well as an Ebook online. We discussed what it was about and the characters in it. We had puppets to reenact the story as well as homemade masks, we even made our own puppets to retell the story. We looked at ordinal numbers to 12, matching the positions the animals came in the race. We completed excellent writing linked to the characters as well as ‘I can see’ sentences. We looked at what ‘the year of the rabbit’ meant and compared that to what we call our year. We completed lots of beautiful artwork, including sponged rabbit art, using traditional celebratory Chinese colours of red, yellows and oranges. We tried on traditional Chinese clothing, looked at Chinese money, as well as Chinese red money envelopes. We explored their traditional music and made our own, and we even made up a dragon dance !