We visited Miss Jenny’s fantastic travel agency – ‘Your Dream Destination’ - and learned more about different types of journeys - we can go on an expedition, trek, tour, cruise etc. We read texts about the destinations to understand what they offered us. We had to look at many different maps to be able to compare the destinations. We looked at climate maps, to learn more about the climate they have at the destination. Did you know that Belgium has a moderate climate, with warm summers and mild, rainy winters? We have talked about the difference between the climate zones – tropical climate, dry climate, continental climate, moderate climate, polar climate and the highlands. We looked at another map where we could see how many hours of bright sunshine a place has per year. We also looked at a map to find out how many time zones we travel to reach a certain destination. Some people like to travel far, others like to stay a bit closer to home.
We ended the whole activity with a role-play where we had to pretend to be customers who wanted to go on a specific type of journey, and the rest of the class had to pretend they worked in a travel agency and help us find our dream destination! Upper Primary pupils did their best to be polite and helpful travel agents.
When we talked about our own dream destinations in our class, we realized that we found different things important when we chose a destination. We are different. But we know that it doesn’t really matter how far we travel or what we do during our holiday, we can still learn new things when we visit new places and meet new people. We also had a long and interesting class discussion about the advantages and disadvantages with tourism. Upper Primary pupils shared their thoughts and ideas and they knew a lot about positive and negative effects of tourism in different parts of the world.
We continued with our imaginary countries in art. The maps are looking like real maps now. We have designed a flag for each country and now we are working on an airline logo for our country. To design a logo is hard work, we have to think about layout and symbols, text size and colours. We will present our art work soon, so keep your eyes open out in the hallway!
In literacy we have read texts and worked with follow-up questions, we have learned more about spelling rules and we have worked with grammar and punctuation. We have also started writing persuasive texts – we want people to understand how fantastic our imaginary countries are and we want them to come and visit! We have started to think about how to attract people’s interest by using persuasive language. We talked about how AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) can help us write better adverts.
In numeracy our focus this week has been to learn more about measurement – both capacity and time (year 3 and 4) and perimeter and area (year 5 and 6). Lots and lots of counting! Lots and lots of thinking! The pupils have all done their best to challenge themselves and learn more.
Once again we had a busy week and we learned a lot! We will hopefully have a lovely (and snowy!) weekend and then we will continue with fun learning here in Upper Primary!