Did you know that the Maya were the first people to turn beans from the cacao tree into drinking chocolate? Well, we were lucky enough to be able to sample a version of this today! We mixed some cacao powder with warmed milk and a dash of chilli powder to be able to try it for ourselves.
Did you guess what we were making? We used the popular Maya ingredients that we blind taste tested yesterday, along with the tortilla wraps we made today, to create tuna salad wraps! We worked carefully to cut and chop the ingredients we needed to add to our tuna – avocados, lettuce and chilli – and then added the ones we were comfortable trying to our freshly fried tortillas! Delicious!
Following our blind taste testing yesterday, we continued with our hook week DT by making our own tortillas! The Ancient Maya people enjoyed making and eating delicious corn tortillas but we made ours with flour. We worked in mini crews to measure out and mix the ingredients to make the dough before rolling this out into tortilla shapes and frying. These were then used to go with our final product – Can you guess what we might have made? HINT: We used some of the ingredients from our taste testing yesterday…
“I’ve got a golden ticket!” – Who will be able to say these 5 magical words by the end of Summer Term?! Crew Hamill have been challenged again to read at home and this time, there will be FIVE winners! The first 5 to reach the golden tickets at the top of our challenge, by reading 30 times, will receive a special reward (that may or may not involve a chocolate baking treat). It’s been so lovely to see the engagement from the children already in this challenge! Lots of children’s names are moving up the oompa loompas and heading towards golden victory!
Today, Crew Hamill continued their hook week investigations into our new expedition by kick starting our DT lessons for this half term with a blind taste test. We all had to close our eyes and were given a selection of different foods that were popular in Ancient Maya. We had no idea what these 5 items were until we had touched them, smelt them and tasted them. Some of us were super brave and made sure we tasted them all! However, lots of us instantly regretted tasting the last food item (chilli pepper!!) and had to run straight to the sink for a drink to cool our mouths down!
Crew Hamill have loved sinking their teeth into their new writing genre this week! We have begun a narrative on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and after spending a few grammar days focusing on speech in order to be able to include this in our retelling of the story, we have today begun to focus on the section of the film we will be writing about. We began by watching a short clip that was taken from the film, where Charlie and the rest of the Golden Ticket winners enter the room of all things edible! We then recalled what we had watched by sequencing a range of pictures from the clip. Finally, we worked as a crew to chot down lots of vocabulary based on what we had seen. We have created an anchor chart full of brilliant vocabulary words that we can use to really make our writing stand out.
We continued our hook week learning by becoming scientists! We discussed that being a scientist means that we gather and use information to make observations and create conclusions and explanations in order to understand our world and how it works. We were then introduced to the States of Matter – Solids, Liquids and Gases. We discussed what each of these were and their main properties before organising different materials based on their state of matter. It was interesting to discover the amount of different solids, liquids and gases we come across in every day life!
Crew Hamill have enjoyed starting a new book in reading lessons this week – A celebration on Planet Zox. This book reintroduced us to some of our favourite characters from previous books we have read and then introduced us to some of their family. We loved being able to make links to our previous learning! We began by making predictions on what we thought the book might be about, thinking perhaps there was a birthday party due to the word “celebration” in the title. We then explored more of the complex vocabulary within the book, identify their definitions. Following this, we completed a book talk lesson in which we answered questions about the book, using Fastest Finger and Have a Think skills. For demo comp, we have moved away from retrieval as this was a huge focus for last half term and is something we are much stronger at now. We have begun to look at inference questions and learned all about identifying clues within the text in order to provide answers. We worked together to pull the questions apart and search through our books for the clues. Once we had identified these, we had a great discussion on what this information was able to tell us and how we could use it to provide a detailed answer. We can’t wait to use these skills tomorrow in our independent comprehension.
Crew Hamill continued being historians by learning all about Ancient Maya Masks. We learned that masks had a central role in Maya culture and that they were made for a variety of reasons – events, death and even to decorate temples! We used the information we learned to then design and create our own Maya mask.
We have continued our work on ‘Latin Dance’ this week by recapping information about Cuban music and how it is influenced. We then practised finding and maintaining a 2-3 clave rhythm, and a 3-2 clave rhythm using untuned percussion instruments. We then applied these rhythms to some traditional Cuban pieces of music.
We practised our piece ‘Latin Dance’, reviewing the lyrics and reminding ourselves of the structure of the piece. We noticed that there were two instrumental parts within the song and we decided to create our own Cuban rhythms to add to the existing instrumental parts.
Once we were happy with our rhythms, we practised the song as a whole, making sure that we were following our conductor to make sure we kept in time with each other and the backing track.
