Sebastian' s mummy came in to talk about Spain. She taught us spanish words like chocolate, milk, candy, ice cream, bread and played a bingo game with us. She taught us a chocolate making song with actions. We thought it was great fun.

Marie's mummy came in to talk to us about Germany. She told us about the fairy tale castle and that the king drowned in a lake, it is a museum now. It is made of white bricks because he likes swans. She taught us some german words like thank you, no, yes, hello, goodbye and how to count to 10. We ate pretzels which are made in the shape of praying arms.

We have talked about the role of the Queen and how Parliament works. We have looked at the buildings they use e.g. palaces and Houses of Parliament. 

The Tower of London used to be a prison but now houses the Crown Jewels and you can visit to have a closer look. We talked about the diamonds, when each different crown is worn and who wears them. We made our own crowns- but not with real jewels! 


Click on the picture to have a 'virtual' look round the Tower of London.

Who do you think should be in charge of a country?

The Union Jack is the flag for the UK, combining the flags of Ireland, Scotland and England- poor Wales is not shown. 

The people of England were very proud of the success of the London Olympics this summer and are now there are many more flags on display around the country.

A giant Union Jack was part of the closing ceremony for the Olympics. It covered the floor of the stadium and was a modern version of our traditional flag. It was designed and made by famous modern british artist, Damien Hirst, using a technique called Spin Art.

This is Damien Hirst with one of his spin art paintings.

We made our own spin art union jacks using a salad spinner! Thanks to Anny for hunting one down for us. We have put our flags up on the wall in our classroom- come and have a look.

Click on the picture for the instructions we used- see if you can make any more at home.

Everyone made a huge effort with their costumes and we discussed the difference between a traditional costume and a fun outfit. It was great to see so many different countries represented in the parade and to try all the activities around DUCKS. 
Can you remember what each person dressed up as?

We read lots of poems in different shapes and looked at the descriptive language. We also experimented with how to read them out loud and gave each other tips on how to make our performance better.
Rain is different all over the world and means different things to different people. We thought about phrases to describe rain and organized them into the rain starting, building to a storm, then slowly stopping. This was written around the outside of the cloud. We brainstormed adjectives and verbs to describe rain and chose ones to write onto our raindrops. 

Come and see our poem, we would love to read it to you!

Thank you to the parents and children who donated english items and helped decorated the classroom, it was a way to introduce the UN topic. We have written questions on the board and aim to find them out over the next two weeks. The children are encouraged to add extra questions. 

You can write on this blog if you have any questions or find out any information about England- remember you get a house point if you do!

Remember to wear a costume to represent your nationality for our parade next Wednesday. If you would like to talk to the class about your home country, you can book in a time for next week during topic time. We already have Sebastian's mum coming in on Wed 24th to play spanish bingo and read a story. 

We read a poem about fire and were interested in it so we used non fiction books to find out about The Great Fire of London. 

Using atlases and Google Earth we worked out how we would get from School to london. We compared times and prices and worked out what we could see. We talked about how lucky they are to fly business class!

Thank you to all the mums who made food and came to join us. Before we ate we talked about why food is exciting and how there can be different foods in different countries. We talked about how british food has been influenced by different cultures and how it has changed over time. We tried cucumber, marmite and jam sandwiches, jam tarts (with an Italian twist), flapjacks, brownies, chocolate biscuits, sausage rolls, crisps etc and talked about what they are called in different countries. Everyone tried something new and we described what the foods tasted like. If we were having dinner we may have had fish and chips, a roast dinner or curry!!

If you have any photos, please email me 1 as mine did not come out very well.

Well done to the children who are writing on the weebly, I hear some children can log in and write by themselves which is great!

I was very pleased with the energy and sportsmanship shown by all children. Congratulations to Wing who were the overall winners. Here are some pictures but as you all have much better cameras than me please feel free to email me your favorite picture to add to this slide show- just 1 each please.

Today we learned all about how packaging has changed over the years. We thought about how the Spanish would have taken the cocoa beans back to Spain and the problems with using wooden crates and hessian sacks on long wet ship journeys. 

Working in groups we looked at pictures of packaging and read the captions to help us try to put them in chronological order. We then looked at different websites such as auction sites for old hand blown glass bottles and posters for different products. We loved the information on milk packaging so have put on this link to the Victoria Museum. After our research we used our new knowledge to evaluate our choices then we had a look at other groups work. When we had made our final decisions we checked them against a timeline- we were very impressed with how close we were. See our photos below- some people were very good group leaders and some people looked very closely at the pictures so could explain their choices very well.

This week we have talked about why we need packaging, advantages and disadvantages and considered the environmental issues. 

Can you write one way that you can reduce, reuse or recycle?