Shiver Me Timbers

Join Christopher Columbus on this adventure to discover a new island. He needs our help as his last two voyages weren't successful. First he was captured by pirates (but he escaped) and on the second voyage he went the wrong way! Do you think we can find a new island and explore it?

We were set a challenge by Mr Cooper. He wanted us to set sail on a ship and find a new island along with help from Christopher Columbus. We didn't know who that was so we had to do our research. He wrote us a message in a bottle telling us all about his previous voyages. He told us to send him one back if we wanted to join. Although we were nervous we decided to join him.

We found out the Christopher Columbus went the wrong way on one of his voyages. To ensure that didn't happen again we looked at compasses and practiced to see how we could use them to find our way.

We then found out that Christopher Columbus wanted to travel west. That had its problems as in the past they didn't know about North and South America. We worked out why his voyage hadn't made it in the past. We created globes and added on our new route.

Pirate Poetry

We had a poet called Chris come and help us to write a poem about pirates. We had to get into character and follow his instructions o become fearsome pirates.

We then performed our poem to the whole school! We were very brave.

This week we have visited the Whomping Willow tree on the island. In art this week we have been looking at the artist Kandinsky. We have been thinking about how colours can show mood. We mixed our own colours to show which were warm and cool and what they meant to us. We then used Kandinsky’s circles to create our own fruit for the tree. It was either poisonous (cool colours) or safe (warm colours).

We began to piece together the whole life of Christopher Columbus and put it on a timeline. We thought about how exploration has changed since the time Christopher Columbus was around.

In DT we have been looking at making a moving picture. we started by looking at lots of different books that had moving pictures in them. We then identified whether they were levers, sliders or wheels.

We then had a go at making a simpler version of a lever, slider and wheel. Once we had made them we then decided which one we liked the best. Some people chose the one they found easier and others chose the one that made things look like they were running.

Once we had designed them we made them using our chosen mechanism. They turned out really well!

The final part of our adventure this half term is to unlock the chest! However it is guarded by a monster with 10 legs and 3 heads. The only way to get past it is to make it fall asleep. To do this we had to make a special sleeping potion.