Moving Mountains

Put on your climbing shoes as there ‘Aint no mountain high enough’ that will keep us from completing this adventure!

We’ve received a letter from the zoo explaining there has been a terrible mix up! They were wanting to release different animals back to their mountainous habitats, but they sent them to the wrong place. It is our mission to collect the animals and take them to the correct mountains. We need to help Glen the Golden Eagle, Halyar the Honey Badger, Sreva the Snow Leopard, Daisy the Dassie and Sachi the Japanese Sarrow. Along the way, we will get the chance to explore different mountains and the countries that they’re in.

 Once we have rehomed all the animals, we hope to take you on a ‘hike’ with us up own very own mountain. Keep a look out for dates!

What songs will we sing along the way?

We have plenty of songs for us to sing while climbing the mountains:

Ain't No Mountain High Enough - Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell

She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain when She Comes 

River Deep Mountain High - Ike & Tina Turner

Climb Every Mountain - Sound of Music

The Climb - Miley Cyrus

Rocking All Over the World - Status Quo 

Can you think of any more? 

We received a letter from the zoo explaining there had been a terrible mix up! They were wanting to release 5 different animals back to their mountainous habitats but they sent them to the wrong place. Our mission is to collect the animals and take them to the correct mountains. Poor Glen the Golden Eagle didn’t even make it to his mountain. We needed to find out where he belongs. We had 5 options of the mountains, we needed to look at the facts of these mountains to help Glen decide where he needs to be.

We started by locating these mountains on a map so we know which continents and countries we’ll be heading to.

We decided Glen was best suited to Ben Nevis. We made a postcard to send to Chester Zoo to let them know where we had taken Glen. We drew the mountain with pastels and wrote down everything we’d learnt about it.

Glen took us on a tour of his new home. We saw Ben Nevis from a birds eye view as we soared around the Scottish mountains. We wrote a setting description.

Glen told us he loved the water here! We learnt all about how mountains play a big role in the water cycle. We pretended we were water drops and thought about what our journey must be like in the cycle.

We then wrote an advert to persuade more people to drink Highland Spring water! It was great fun tasting it, we could really see how much of a difference the mountain makes to making the water tasty.

 After we delivered Glen safely to Ben Nevis, we found another creature who seemed out of place. It was Halvar the honey badger. We worked out that he needed to be on Kilimanjaro. So we travelled all the way there and wrote our next postcard. We sketched the mountain and included facts.

We wanted to create a documentary all about Kilimanjaro, so we created a script for it.

We thought it was important to learn all about the different features of a mountain before we continued to our next destination.

We thought it would be fun to draw a picture of our new friend Halvar! We tried lots of different sketching techniques.

We then wrote a social media profile for him, as we found out that honey badgers are not as cute and as innocent as they seem!

Finally, we learnt about the Maasai warriors who live around the base of Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. They taught us how to do their traditional jumping dance.

Next, we had to find Sreva the Snow leopard her home! We decided she was best suited to Mount Everest. We learnt lots of facts about her new home and created our next postcard. For the pictures, we used rubbings for natural items found outdoors.

We met some Sherpas and then led us up the mountain. It was very scary as we couldn’t see a thing. To make things worse, there was an earthquake! We wrote our experiences down in a diary.

Then we learnt all about mountain travel and how to do this safely. We also looked at how mountains encourage tourism and the impact of this.

After our traumatic experience, we wanted to create a safety poster for other people wanting to climb Mount Everest, to let them know what they were getting themselves into!

We were then asked to design some new footwear for mountain climbers. We had great fun and took part in our very own Dragons Den.

We then needed to home Sachi the Japanese serow. Her name gave us a big clue as we already knew Mount Fuji was in Japan! We wrote a postcard home full of facts about Mount Fuji. We also painted the stunning mountain in the style of Japanese artist Hokusai who painted 36 different pictures of Mount Fuji!

We found out that Mount Fuji is a sacred place for the Shinto religion – a branch of Buddhism. We learnt that people travel here for pilgrimage. We then completed a Burn2Learn to learn about 8 other places that Buddhist visit on their pilgrimages.

We also thought about other religions and their pilgrimages. We looked at where pilgrimages in Christianity and Hinduism.

We then wrote a letter back home telling our family about our experience of our pilgrimage to Mount Fuji.

We wrote a Japanese Haiku poem inspired by the beautiful surroundings and scenery of Mount Fuji.

We noticed lots of blossom trees around us. We used ink and straws to recreate their beauty.

We found out that you can only climb Mount Fuij between the months of July and August due to the drastic changes in climate. So we learnt about the different climates of mountains all over the world.

After a long day climbing Mount Fuji, we needed some delicious Japanese food! We had great fun making it and of course eating during our trip to Wagamamas.

We then only had one animal left to home – Daisy the Dassie. She belonged on Table Mountain in South Africa. This mountain is so different to the others that we visited. We learnt how to draw cartoons of ourselves for our postcard.

As Table Mountain is such a different shape from any that we have been to throughout this adventure, we decided to learn about the different formations of mountains and how they are all so different.

We created a persuasive leaflet to encourage people to explore this amazing mountain using the cable cars.

We then recreated the mountains we visited using papier Mache,, thinking about their different formations and how they all look unique.

We really wanted to find out more about the rocks that we’d seen on the mountains. We learnt about the different types of rocks and how they’re created. We then used what we’d learnt to sort them.

Next, we grouped these rocks through carrying out an investigation, we studied whether the rocks were permeable by covering them in water droplets, whether they were durable by rubbing them against sand paper, whether they were dense by testing if they float or sank in water and whether they were soft or hard.

We then looked at soil formation and the different types of soil, we had to match the rocks with the correct soil.

After meeting such lovely animals, we thought it would be fun to create our very own creature that could live on one of our mountains! We wrote a character description about them.

We then used these new characters to create our very own story set on a mountain, and of course we used a story mountain to help us with planning our story.

To celebrate successfully rehoming all of the animals, we wanted to invite our friends and family in for a mountain expedition! We created a picnic to share with them at the summit.

When they arrived, we blindfolded them and we were their Sherpas to guide them to the top. We then celebrated reaching the summit by eating our picnic.