Learning about Africa - Part 2

Sooo... Finishing up with our topic on Africa this week. Here's a little of what we got up to.

Send-A-Cow have a nice colouring/presentation resource for younger children (also very handy to simplify things for special needs kids) and some nice videos about the work that they do, which Lamb enjoyed. We plan on getting Daddy to help us send a chicken as a thankyou for the lovely resources. Great resources actually, not just for learning about life in rural African countries, but also for talking about charities and why their work is so important.

One of my personal favourites this week were our animal riddles. Lamb found this rather perplexing because he thinks so literally, but with that fact in mind I was super pleased with him for managing to come up with something... of course Mummy did the writing :) The point of the exercise was not handwriting so I didn't want to give him too many challenges at once thereby running the risk of failure. And nobody likes feeling a failure, especially little boys that already have too much "can't" in their vocabulary.

More practising bar charts too. As Lamb has already grasped how to fill in a bar chart we've started to move on so that Lamb has to start remembering how to draw up the bar chart itself. Went well!

And a quick name check of a couple of books that are brilliant for a KS1 African topic. 'Bringing the rain to Kapiti plain' is a lovely repetative, lyrical story of drought and the eventual rain that follows. "This is the Tree" is an equally good book that tells of all the different animals that are sustained by the Baobab tree, with really nice life-like pictures of the animals, both those you might expect to appear in a book about african animals, and others that get a look in far less often.

There were a few things we didn't get around to doing, but the enthusiasm for all things Africa. Unusually for me the end of our African topic found me completely unprepared for our next topic. Hmmm. I've ordered in lots of Shirley Hughes books for the interim and figure we'll spend a week or so just reading through these and talking about the life experiences in the stories, while we carry on with maths and literacy. I'm thinking maybe we might have an R.E topic next. Hinduism maybe? Or should we go for a science unit? It's been a while since we did a science unit. Ak, better decide quickly!