Spring 2 - Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
We begin our new adventure by meeting the main character of our new book - Charlie himself! Whilst working from home, we find out Charlie is from Scotland and begin by locating it on a map of the UK. We learn about Scotland including it's capital city and some key features. On Purple Mash, we look at computer mapping and digital maps.
When we returned to school, we started to think about the next big character in the book - Augustus Gloop. We learnt about where Augustus comes from - Germany. We found out lots of interesting facts about the country and it's features in our Geography lesson.
We started to think about ways we could advise Augustus to ensure his diet was healthier and to help him get fit again. In our RSHE lesson, we discussed why it is important to eat healthy and stay active. The children examined different packaging and we discussed what companies do to make us want to but the unhealthier foods. It was then time to get active ourselves and as part of our Burn2Learn, we split up the afternoon with a quick Joe Wicks.
This week has also been Science Week and in between our Adventure lessons, we have done lots of science activities including meeting a variety of science professionals, asking some really big questions and visiting a farm with a vet. You can see what we got up to in science week here.
We wrote great informative leaflets to inform people of the ways they can keep healthy and the benefits. In SPAG, we thought really carefully about our writing including using some interesting subheadings to break the leaflet up and fronted adverbials to make our sentences more interesting.
Later in the week, we learnt about Mike Teavee. As he is obsessed with technology, we thought we'd think about how to keep safe when using it. We looked at online safety and completed a Burn2Learn treasure hunt to find out the information we needed. Well done to our fastest team who completed the treasure hunt in 15 minutes and 45 seconds!
We imagineered entering the factory to find the sweet room. We saw the chocolate river and tasted all of the wonderful creations. We wrote expanded noun phrases to help with our setting description to send back to Slugworth.
In writing this week, we wrote a fantastic setting description back to Slugworth describing everything we could see, hear, smell and taste in the sweet room - this will help him on his mission to steal the recipe from Wonka!
In art, we combined our work in our adventure around the sweet room with our science topic of plants. We first looked at the work of Angie Lewin who creates prints based around plants. We researched her work and thought about our opinions of them. Then, we sketched the background to our picture which included lots of different sweets. Meanwhile, children worked with Mrs Wilson to prepare the lino blocks - they very carefully traced around a candy cane tree onto a block. The next stage is to use cutting tools to cut the outline out before applying paint and printing it onto our picture - keep checking back here to see our progress!
We then learnt about the live of Violet, who we found out lives in Middleton! We found out about the different parts of Middleton and how to draw a sketch map. We then completed sketch maps of Middleton High Street thinking about the different features there and how we can represent them on a map which doesn't need to be too detailed.
In geography this week, we have been thinking about map reading and improving our skills of directions and grid references on maps. We learnt about 4 and 6 figure grid references and completed some challenges incorporating these. We also looked at the cardinal and inter cardinal points on a compass and used these to locate our way around Willy Wonka's chocolate factory.
We met Veruca Salt and thought about her experience in the factory. We decided that she wasn't treated very well at all so wanted to help her. We wrote a letter on behalf of Veruca to Willy Wonka to complain about what happened to us at the factory and what we wanted to happen as a result.
In our Mindmate lessons, we have been thinking about strong emotions and we made the most of the beautiful weather this week by going outside and taking part in some mindfulness meditation. We thought that some of our characters in our story who are quite explosive and get angry could take on some of this advice!
In RE, we've been learning about the Easter Story. We all understood that there was lots of chocolate involved in Easter (linking in very nicely to our adventure), but not all of us were totally clear of the religious meaning behind it. We learnt about what happened to Jesus and recreated this as a comic strip.