In our book talk, we read the text and started to unpick the vocabulary. This supports our comprehension of the text. We read around the word and used the root word to help us determine the definition. Once we knew what the word meant, we text marked this and record it on the vocabulary wall.
What a way to end a fantastic hook week! This afternoon, we took part in our very own ‘Ready, Steady, Cook’ and followed a recipe to make cookies.
While they were baking, we then started to discuss what a healthy diet was and what the different food types were. Next, came the blind tasting…which got mixed reviews. It was great to try different foods and lots of us found something that we liked that we had not tasted before. Overall, a great end to a great week!
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.
TGIF! What a way to end the week (although the cleaners might disagree). Thank you to the parents that were able to join us for our own merging of Ready, Steady, Cook and Funhouse!
The task was simple: bake cookies. The outcome was over two hundred baked cookies, some questionable stains on the carpets and an engaging, hands-on afternoon. It was great to see everyone (even the parents) getting involved and better to see the awesome collaboration between the whole crew not only to make sure everyone could make cookies but also to share out the ones that were ready before the end of the day. We may just have some future Bake-Off candidates lurking in our midst! If all this wasn’t enough, the blind food-tasting was also a great way to show how much of our food preferences come down to our vision and what a food “looks like” rather than its taste or benefits.
A final word from the parents. Have a great weekend!
We began the day by thinking back to what we already knew about the human body. We cut out bones to create a skeleton and explored why we have a skeleton. Next, we added in the organs and recapped the digestive system to ensure our learning from last year had stuck.
After that, we completed two kahoot quizzes about the skeleton and the digestive system before moving on to what we would the focus of our case study: the circulatory system. Finally, we actually explored a real heart and watched a dissection. It was amazing to see the different chambers and blood vessels and to actually touch these.
On Monday afternoon, we used the Children’s University of Manchester to develop our knowledge of the Ancient Egyptians whilst improving our digital literacy. This was really interesting and we learnt loads of new things (some of us even wanted to read up more about what we’d looked at on Myon)!
On Thursday, we recapped some of our learning from last year with a Kahoot! Quiz. We then started to connect this to newer learning and explored skeletons and their function. We then drew round some of our crew and thought about which bones would be where to create our own anchor charts. In the afternoon we got to the best bit. We watched a heart dissection and got to feel the difference between a healthy heart and one with a large amount of fat build-up. It was amazing seeing the different sections, the tendons and the blood vessels…even if it wasn’t for everyone!
On Tuesday, we took a trip back in time to build background knowledge about the ancient Egyptians. This was an amazing experience that taught us loads that we never thought was possible! We started by watching (and helping) a mummification, which was really gruesome! We then moved on to some Egyptian games: mancala and senet. These were a little confusing at first but we really enjoyed them! Senet was really like snakes and ladders! After that, we got a chance to ask questions with our expert who taught us lots of things about the ancient Egyptians. Then we had the chance to investigate artefacts and find out a little more about what being a historian is like. We answered questions to learn more but actually think they weren’t all that different to us today. After a much-needed lunch, we got to use reed pens, ink and papyrus to try our hand writing hieroglyphs – it was much harder than we thought and took a lot longer too! To finish off, we played a game where we had to think about building a city and which buildings would make our city great. It was an action-packed day and we really enjoyed it!
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.
