Finally, we managed to construct our tuna salad wrap which contained many popular Mayan food such as avocado, red chilli pepper, lettuce and tuna. We was super careful when using or chopping and cutting skills to cut the vegetables for the wrap. We really enjoyed our wraps, they were delicious!
We refreshed ourselves after all our hard work with a typical Mayan drink! We mixed some cacao powder with warmed milk and a dash of chilli powder to replicate the ancient Mayas recipe.
In expedition this afternoon, we made our own tortillas after finding out these were a staple food in the Mayan civilisation. We worked in mini crews and worked together (putting or mass and capacity knowledge to good use) and weighed all the ingredients. We rolled the dough and fried it to make the tortilla. We are going to need the tortilla in our next lesson.
In our book talk lessons this week, we started a new book called “The Great Chocoplot” by Chris Callaghan. First, we started off by completing a jigsaw of the front cover. We then discussed what we thought the book may be about, whether the book would be a fiction or a non fiction book and how we know this. We came up with some fantastic ideas such as “the girl on the front cover might have stole a chocolate bar and they are investigating it. We then read some of the book, text marking any important information and words which we don’t understand. We read around the word and looked at the root word to unpick these words.
In expedition, we have tried different foods whilst our eyes were shut. We were given each piece of food and used our senses to see if we could figure out what it was. First, we touched the food to see what it felt like, then we smelt the food to see if there were any strong smells to identify and then we tasted it. We guessed tuna because of the smell but we struggled with avocado!
In Scotties today we had an exercise bootcamp! It was super hard work and he made us do some tricky exercises but we all persevered and completed it! We are excited for next week.
We have looked deeper into the Mayan civilisation and discovered that they used masks. They had event masks and death masks which were used for different purposes. Event masks were used for celebrations and special events and were vibrant and colourful. Death masks were made from Jade because it symbolises the soul. The people designed their own death masks and were buried with them. We designed our own Mayan mask and cut squares of card out to decorate it.
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.
We became historians and looked at the timeline of the Mayan civilisation. We noticed that on a timeline the BC years descend and the AD years ascend. We discussed what it means to be a historian and what skills this includes.
During this lesson, we used our knowledge of French numbers up to 12 to play French outdoor games on the playground! We discussed the French for common phrases such as your turn, my turn, winner, and miss a turn before heading out!
First, in small groups we had to use a diagram to draw out our game area. This game ‘la marelle’ was similar to hopscotch. We used chalk to draw out the game area before taking it in turns to throw the rock to a number. We had to call out the number 1 in French before skipping to the end of the grid ‘le ciel’ (the sky), coming back to ‘la terre’ (the earth) and collecting the rock to pass on to the next person, saying à toi (your turn). The next person then had to throw the rock on to the next number and repeat the same process. If the player did not roll the rock onto the correct number they had to shout ‘manque’ to show they were missing a turn. The winner ‘gagne’ was the first person to accurately throw the rock to number 10 and move along the game area to get to ‘le ciel’.
This lesson we were looking at the skill of being able to read numbers 1-12 in French.
We used word cards for the numbers 1-12 to try and put them in the correct order.
We then discussed how to talk about and ask ‘how many?’ in French. We practised our pronunciation and understanding by turning over unknown picture cards and asking ‘Il y a combien?’ after counting in French, our partner then had to find the corresponding written number card to create a pair.
