The American Dream

Welcome back to Oak Class in 2019! We'd like to wish you all a very happy new year and we can't wait to see what adventures we'll go on this year. 

Wish you were here...

We came back after the holidays to find out that our class had won a competition to travel across the United States of America! The best part is that we get to plan where we visit and what we'll get up to while we're there. We can't wait to see where our adventure will take us. We started planning our trip straight away and looked at several travel brouchers. We then pitched where we'd like to visit to the rest of the class and voted on the destinations and activities that we'd like to visit and do there. 

Our trip across the Atlantic ocean will begin as soon as we get back from Robin Wood! We're so excited. Keep checking back on our website to see all the fun and exciting things we do while we live our very own American Dream! 

Miss Martin told us that we had won a competition to visit North America! Our prize was to plan our dream holiday across America. We started planning our dream trip by looking at all the different countries in North America. We then looked at travel brochures and chose some exciting looking destinations and activities and created a mood board to help us decide where to go. We all agreed we wanted to explore the United States of America so we boarded our cruise ship. Unfortunately there was a huge storm whilst we were on our ship! We wrote a diary to explain what happened.

Luckily, we ended up in New York! Whilst we were there we explored the state and found out lots of information about the fantastic state.1. After lots of walking around, Miss Martin said her leg was really hurting from being shipwrecked so we visited a doctor in New York. They told us all about the importance of a balanced diet and about the nutrients we should be getting from our food.The Doctor then took us to Central Park zoo where we compared humans to animals. We looked at different types of skeleton, the names of the bones in our bodies and their functions.1. We then wrote everything we’d learnt about our bodies in a non-chronological report. Whilst we were at Central Park zoo we heard that one of their Grizzly bears had escaped! We interviewed their zoo keeper, Brooke and wrote what we found into a newspaper report.

Brooke the zoo keeper suggested that Betty the bear might of wanted to go back to her home of Yellowstone Park, so we decided to go there and look for her. Before we arrived at the park, we wanted to learn as much as possible about the park. We used atlases to find out what states the park was in. We then worked in our teams to find lots of facts about the parks geology, hydrothermal activity, wildlife and its history. We met a park ranger called Jackie. She told us that not many people are visiting the park anymore, so she asked us to create leaflets to persuade more people to visit. As Yellowstone Park is a super volcano, Jackie also taught us about different types of volcanoes and their features. We also found out what would happen to the world if Yellowstone volcano erupted! We’re keeping our fingers crossed that it doesn’t happen anytime soon.

Unfortunately, our persuasive leaflets didn’t work and Jackie told us that she received a letter saying the government wanted to close the park! We were so angry that we wanted to write a speech persuading them to keep the park open. Inspired by learning about the great outdoors, we made a trip to our own park and created some natural artwork of Yellowstone. The results were fantastic! Jackie told us about a famous North American artist called Anselm Adams. He creates beautiful black and white collages of landscapes. Inspired by his work, we decided to create our own collages using images of Yellowstone.

When walking around Yellowstone Park, we suddenly noticed something strange hanging from the trees. They were dream catchers! The park ranger told us they belonged to the Sioux tribe. So we travelled to the state of Minnesota to visit them. They taught us lots about their tribe’s history and they even taught us how to find out our Native American name. We asked them to show us how to make our very own dream catchers. They were great fun to make. While we were asleep, our dream catchers caught some dreams! This gave us a great idea to write a story about our dreams. We had to start our story with the sentence that the dream catcher had caught. We then rolled some story dice to help us think of more ideas to include in our story.

Next we designed and made some Native American headdresses. The tribe were so impressed with how they turned out that they asked us to write some instructions so they could make some just like ours!

Next we travelled all the way to California! We took a tour and saw the sites. We completed a Burn2Learn to help us learn all about California .Whilst looking around California, we spotted a beautiful building! It was a Gurdwara, the place of worship for Sikhs. We went inside and the Guru told us all about their religion. He started by telling us the story of Guru Nanak. The Guru then told us all about the Vaisakhi festival. We wanted to retell this story through a play. So we created a play script and then performed our play to the rest of the class. The Guru then took us on a tour around the Gurdwara. We learnt all about the different things that you can find inside a Gurdwara. We’re going to see whether we can spot them all on our trip to our local Gurdwara!

The Guru then took us on a tour around the Gurdwara. We learnt all about the different things that you can find inside a Gurdwara. We’re going to see whether we can spot them all on our trip to our local Gurdwara!

Once we arrived back, we wanted to write down everything that we did there so we wrote a recount. We had such a fantastic time in the USA that we thought we should write our own TripAdvisor reviews! We reviewed each place we visited and gave some advice on where to go. Our adventure was so fantastic that we wanted to share it with our friends and family! We put on an assembly and there was a great turn out.

Writing Buddies in Blossom

We made our regular trip to Blossom class at the end of our adventure to show them all of our fantastic writing! We love showing them our favourite pieces and hearing what they've been up to in their own adventure.