Room 3 Kirklandneuk: April 2013

We have been very busy this term, learning about Pirates and ships.

We enjoyed reading about the topic, working together in our groups and displaying our learning around the classroom in preparation for our open evening.

We started with our learning plan. What did we already know and what did we want to learn about?

We all found that Pirates are really interesting. We discussed a number of real and fictional pirates. We especially liked hearing about Blackbeard and the girl pirates, Anne Bonney and Mary Read. We were less impressed with Calico Jack. We thought the girls were braver than he was!

We worked in our cooperative learning groups to create our annotated pirate. Each group used a variety of materials to decorate their section of the pirate. It was then fastened together and we made the relevant labels.
We went on to make pirate flags and treasure maps. The treasure maps were a popular activity but our classroom smelled of tea for a little while afterwards!

We continued to discover more about pirate ships and how pirates attacked other boats. We all contributed to the painting of our class ship along with annotating smaller versions individually in our pirate books.

We made good use of our time in the ICT suite, not only for research, but also to present our findings by typing up the information and printing it out for display.

We used a variety of different writing frames to display our writing. We wrote stories, poems and descriptions, as well as annotating diagrams and answering questions.

These are only a few of the pieces displayed around our classroom.

Mrs Ayres was extremely impressed with the results of our homework challenge and everyone else has been too.

What a lot of time and effort has gone into these projects!

It was really good to see the variety of approaches and every child can be very proud of their work.

We had treasure chests, fact files, treasure maps, eye patches, telescopes and ships.

All of superb quality as you can see.

After discovering a good deal about pirates and the types of ships that they sailed in, we moved on to look at our house ships, recording facts about each of them such as when and where they were built.

We were interested to find out more about building the ships. We watched a film that described some of the different jobs that were important in the shipyards.

We worked together to produce posters outlining some of the key jobs and what was involved.

We then wrote a job advert for a position of our choice such as

welders, plumbers, architects, and joiners,
and displayed these as a situations vacant board.

It was almost time for our open evening. Having made invitations for our families and displayed all of our work, we wanted to share what we had learned.