We have read Handa's Surprise this week and have been learning about different cultures. Handa lives in Africa and we noticed lots of differences between where Handa lives and where we live. The children had summer clothes on in the story because the weather was hot and dry. Their houses looked very different from ours. The little girl in the story takes lots of different fruits to her friend as a gift. On the way lots of different animals sneak up and steal Handa's fruit. The animals were very different from the animals that live in this country - there was an ostrich, a zebra, an elephant, a giraffe, an antelope, a monkey and a parrot.
Ebony, Courtney and Taloola act out Handa's Surprise
We have also looked at the different fruits she carried to her friends. Some of the fruits were very unusual - there was a passion fruit and a pineapple, a mango and a guava, a banana and an orange. There was also an avocado pear - Abigail knew the names of all the fruits ! On Monday we did some observational paintings of the different fruits, and on Tuesday we made our own fruit baskets. On Thursday Mrs Young cut open a passion fruit for us to see what was inside - we didn't like the look of it !
Jona looks carefully at the fruit as she is painting
Abigail paints carefully
We also made our own fruit salads with Miss Cannell. We carefully used the knives to cut up all the fruit and then we chose which fruit we would like in our fruit salad. When we had finished - we tasted our fruit salad and discussed which fruit we preferred.
Making our fruit salads
Oniaka has told us all about her holiday to Africa. She told us about how hot it was and that her daddy comes from Africa from a country called Kenya. She told us that she had to go on a plane to get to Africa and we found Africa and Kenya on the globe. We also used an atlas to find the different countries.
We have been busy doing lots of number problems this week too - on Monday Alfie (our dog) had his birthday party and we worked out how many sandwiches and biscuits we needed. We were lucky that he had some biscuits left and we could all have one !
On Tuesday we did some number problems with our basket of fruit and Mrs Young was really impressed that some of us were working out the answer to the problems by counting on in our heads. We have also been making repeating patterns with lots of different things. Abigail made a necklace with 5 repeating colours and so did Indianna - wow! We even made African necklaces with repeating patterns with Miss Ball.
What fantastic African necklaces !
This week Eimantas is taking home Diggory because he has made such fantastic progress with his phonics - well done Eimantas !
Well that's all for this week.
Grasshopper Class