When we arrived at school we found an agg in the bushes. There were footprints and scraps off food. We had to work out who had left the egg behind! Our clues were: it was a carnivore, it was a reptile, it layed eggs and it had to be quite big due to the size of the egg. After much deliberation, we settled on it being a crocodile.

Seeing as we found the egg outside, we thought we better think about how to stay safe outside (especially if there is a crocodile on the loose!). We thought about different safety rules that we should follow when we are outside.

We found out about a lemur who had been captured from Madagascar and needed our help. We read the book 'A Lemur's Tale' and found out all the naughty things the lemur had been up to when it escaped from the ship. Poor Lara got the blame from her Mum and Dad for everything the lemur did! We looked at what had been happening and tried to help Lara by coming up with lots of reasons why it couldn't have been her.

This week a lemur has been sent to ur zoo all the way from Madagascar! The only problem is the lemur is a little mischievous and got busy in our classroom over night! We had a big tidy up mission on our hands and we needed to find the lemur!

This week we had lions and elphants join our zoo. They were having a bit of rouble with their enclosures next to each other! The elphants were squirting water as high as they could and it was getting the lions wet! The lions had nowhere to hide. We decided to make them dens for shelter. We designed our dens using natural resources to be as close to a lions actual habitat. We had a design criteria to follow:

must withstand the wind

must be waterproof

must fit the toy lion in

We make mock-ups of our designs to generate more ideas and solve any problems we might have found.

We collected different resources to build our dens. We measured out each stick to ensure they were the same length.

We then created our dens from sticks, leaves and grass. We made sure our lion would fit and then we tested it against our design criteria.

Den Building Workshop

We took part in a den building workshop to put our skills to the test. We followed the same success criteria. At the end of the session our dens were put to the test with leaf blowers and actual rain!

To help us organise our zoo better, we thought about different ways to group animals. We had a go at thinking of a variety of ways to group them (type of skin/fur, number of legs, where they live) and then we categorised them into mammal, amphibians, fish, birds and reptiles.

A couple of animals from our zoo broke out last night! The only evidence we could find was their poo. We decided to dissect it to see what the animal had eaten to determine if it was a carnivore, herbivore or omnivore. From their we could narrow down who the escapees were.

It was time to design the leaflet for our zoo. We wanted them to be different to other zoo's. We looked at the work of the sculpture artist Andrew Goldsworthy and created our own animals in a simaliar style usinf natural rescources.

In preparation for our zoo opening, we made biscuits to give away to our first visitors.