Practice our adventure song below!

This half term we are travelling to Brazil, after blowing off course on our way home from our last adventure! As we arrive over Rio De Janeiro, we notice a protest from people trying to save the rainforest. We decide to stop and find out what is happening, looking at the physical and human geography of Brazil's favelas and the rainforest. 

We looked at the location of Brazil and identified its major cities as well as characteristics about each city. Knowing all about it’s location will help us later on in our adventure when we look at different climate zones and The Amazon Rainforest.

We were shocked at what we saw at the protest, we decided to write an eye witness report to send back to school to show people the issues that are occurring in Brazil! 

March is the month of Mardi Gras! In contrast to the protests we saw last week, this week everyone came together to celebrate this wonderful event! We were intrigued by the music we could hear and decided to have a look into the ‘Samba’ style of music. 
 

We started off by looking at the different instruments involved and their sounds and roles in Samba before trying them our ourselves and looking at some basic samba rhythms.

Next in our adventure, we we met a boy called Ricardo who introduced us to the favelas where he lives. We were shocked at how many millions of people were living in these dangerous conditions and decided to write a diary entry in the shoes of Ricardo. 
 

Next in our adventure, we moved from the busy and bustling cities to the Amazon Rainforest! We began by looking at some images and learnt about its inhabitants, even creating our own rainforests for homework!

Next, we began taking a closer look at animals in the Amazon and how they can be grouped together. We became taxonomists for the day and looked at how they would out similar animals together by observing their behaviours and characteristics. 

We then looked at the standard way that scientists group animals together called the Linnaean System and why it’s important. 

After looking at all of the different animals in the rainforest, we decided to make our own moving model of one. We firstly designed our animal and drew a cross-section of the moving part before making a prototype then finally making our final product!

After creating our model animals, we spent some time comparing different life cycles of animals and humans whilst looking at the question ‘ Are all life cycles the same?’. We then created diagram to show the lifecycle of a mammal. 

Next, we compared Leeds and the rest of the Uk with Brazil. We looked at similarities and differences of the two and created a list to show them. 

For our writing this week, we wrote a discussion about whether the Rainforest should be destroyed or not. We looked at the reasons some people may want to chop the Rainforest down and also the importance of keeping the rainforest. 

To finish off our adventure, we visited Pudsey Town Hall on the 1st April and took part in The Big Samba! Lots of schools from across Leeds met and learnt lots of new techniques used to play Samba and at the end, we performed what we had learned all together. We had lots of fun singing and dancing whilst playing our instruments!