Chinese Food

This week we have been reading about ancient China. The children cooked these fortune cookies and these pork spring rolls. Both recipes were difficult and involved lots of rolling up. The end result tasted great even though the rolls were more like blobs!

Fortune cookies

Spring rolls

Bottle Bird Feeders

Today we made these bird feeders from a bottle, a piece of plastic cup, a chop stick and gaffa tape.

4 Squares +1, And A Paragraph

We have been expanding our four squares this week, by adding more detail to each section. The children then wrote up quite a long piece of writing based on their four square. See previous posts for more information.

By L

By L

By R

By R

Evolution Part 1

Recently I have had loads of difficult questions from the children such as "How did apes turn into people?", and "Were monsters alive when dinosaurs were?". So I decided to try out this unit study on evolution from Intellego Unit Studies. So far the children and I are pretty impressed.

The first part is about palaeontology. First we talked about what we already know and what we want to find out.

By R

By L

We then followed some links in the curriculum to read up on fossils and palaeontology. We also , watched some videos. We then found out a bit about diversity. This involved some new vocabulary.

By R

By R

 Next we went outside to see how diverse life is in our garden.

By R

By L

We then explored the house for evidence of life (or things that had once been alive). Our nature table, fridge and food cupboards contained lots of diversity.

By R

By L

Next we watched some videos about palaeontologists. We talked about how collecting fossils and interpreting them can be like doing a jigsaw puzzle with some of the pieces missing. So next we made a jigsaw, took out some of the pieces, buried it, and then dug it up again.

 Diplodocus puzzle by L

Stegosaurus puzzle by R

Burying the puzzles

Excavating the "fossils"

The children then had to put the puzzles back together and add their interpretations for the missing sections.

We're only a short way in to the unit study so stay tuned for more...

Origami And Calligraphy

Today we studied two Chinese arts - origami and calligraphy. We saw these "origami" sculptures at Sculptures by the sea at Bondi. This one is made of aluminium rather that paper. We folded our own versions and later floated them in the bath.

Today we have also been reading about the development of writing in ancient China. The children had a go at making the 7 different marks used in Chinese characters and also painted a couple of complete symbols. It was pretty hard. Can you spot field, tree, forest and woman?

Circus Skills

Today we joined our friends for circus skills with Circus Arts at Sydney Olympic Park. We had a go at acrobatics, tight rope wire, plate spinning, juggling, baton twirling, and trapeze. After that we were free to enter the aquatic centre for swimming.

R makes his way up the trapeze - see the video for what happens next.

Four Squares Plus One

This week we are expanding our four square writing (see previous posts) to included one extra detail in each box. In this way our paragraph is getting longer and more interesting.

By L

By R