This week, our focus story was the classic ‘Handa’s Surprise’ by Eileen Browne which tells the tale of a girl called Handa who wants to surprise her friend, Akeyo, with 7 delicious fruits.  She puts her fruit into a basket and sets off to Akeyo’s village, carrying the basket on her head. Can you remember why she carried the basket on her head?

Along the way, seven cheeky animals take the different fruits from Handa’s basket without her realising!  You can rewatch the story in this video below.  Can you remember what happens at the end?  Why was Handa surprised to discover tangerines in her basket?

The story of Handa’s Surprise is set in a country called Kenya which is on the continent of Africa and, would you believe it, it’s the next stop on Granny’s world tour!

image from https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/28991991326989290/

Even though, it felt like we were already in Kenya at the start of the week, as the temperatures in Nursery rose into the high 20s, we jumped back onto our magic carpet, buckled up and headed south, waving goodbye to the snowy Matterhorn and the grazing Swiss cows.

We entered ‘Masai Mara National Reserve’ into our Google Earth GPS and landed on a very different landscape to the one we had left behind!  It was very flat, without any mountains and it looked very hot with only a little bit of shade under a tree here and there.

We used the little orange man to land safely and he guided us onto a very long, straight road.  We set our compass to travel westwards and went along the road for a little while until, all of a sudden, we spotted something in the distance!  As we got closer, we could make out some animals grazing by the side of the road.  They had four legs, tails and black & white stripes!  Can you remember what they were?  That’s right – we came across a herd of zebras!

We quickly got to work, making our very own binoculars, so we could be sure to spot many of the other animals that are known to live in Kenya, such as lions, leopards, cheetahs and elephants!

While we were in Kenya, Miss Cronin also managed to find (most of) the fruits from Handa’s basket.  Unfortunately, it was too tricky to track down any guavas, so we had to make do with a bottle of guava juice.  Can you remember the names of the other six fruits?

We had a go at feeling, smelling and chopping up the different fruits.  Then we blended all the pieces together to make a delicious smelling mixture.  As it was so hot, we decided to make our mixture into ice lollies!  We carefully poured the green liquid into ice lolly containers, added the sticks and popped them into the freezer.

Please note, as the chopping and preparation of the ice lollies was quite time consuming, only about half of the class had a go at this activity.  As we knew the weather was going to change on Thursday, we made the decision to make enough ice lollies for everyone and those children who have not yet had a go chopping the fruit will do so next week.

By the time the ice lollies had frozen (mid-week), it was perfect weather for them and the general consensus was they were yummy!

We also found some time to make some painted footprints…

…which we turned into special bookmarks for Father’s Day – you should find yours in your book bag.

If you celebrate Father’s Day, we hope you are having a lovely day together. See you tomorrow everyone!

Welcome back to the final half term of the school year!  We hope everyone had a lovely half term and managed to enjoy getting out and about a bit more than we have been able to over the last few months.

The children all returned with great big smiles and were keen to dive straight back into their play.  Our class Governor visited us on Friday morning and one of her comments was that the children all seemed very happy!  The children made her feel very welcome and proudly showed her around the classroom and garden.

We started off the week reading the delightful story of “The Cow that went Oink” by Bernard Most which had all of us laughing out loud! We all agreed that it was very lucky that the cow and the pig met each other.  We also knew that it is not kind and friendly to laugh at people when they make mistakes.

You can revisit the story here:

This story gave us a bit of a clue as to where we might be going next on our magic carpet.  The country that Granny visited after China is famous for the cows that graze high up in its beautiful mountains wearing large bells around their necks.  We wondered why they wear these bells and decided it is most likely so the farmers can hear their cows and keep track of them if they wander off.

We watched this video and were amazed by the sound of bells all ringing at once:

Have you worked out which country we flew to next?  Another clue would be that this country is also famous for its chocolate!

That’s right, it’s Switzerland!

We unrolled our magic carpet, held on tight and waved goodbye to the Great Wall of China.  We flew up, up and away westwards, back to Europe and came down to land on a very high mountain peak!  We could see lots of snow and ice too and we thought this must mean we were very high up.  We didn’t think the cows could live on this part of the mountain as there would be no grass for them to eat.

We learnt that the mountain we had landed on is called the Matterhorn and it is one of the highest mountains in Switzerland and in Europe.  We thought the name sound a bit like unicorn!  And we also thought the peak itself looked a bit like the shape of a unicorn horn!

image from wikipedia

The Matterhorn shape is also described as ‘pyramidal’, so we spent some time this week learning more about this 3D shape.  Specifically, we took a closer look at a square pyramid; that means it has a square on the bottom and triangles on the sides.

image from wikipedia

Can you spot any pyramids or Matterhorn mountains amongst our constructions?

We were also fascinated to learn that some people have climbed the Matterhorn, even though it is covered in slippery ice.  Dani Arnold is a Swiss mountaineer who set a new world record when he climbed the north face of the Matterhorn in 2015 in only 1 hour and 46 minutes!  Here is a photo of Dani:

image from wikipedia

And you can watch him climbing the Matterhorn in the video below.  We were very interested to see the sort of equipment he needed to keep himself safe; a helmet, special shoes and ice axes to help him hold on!

Some of the children also thought it would be lots of fun to sledge all the way back down and we wondered if that is what Dani did after he reached the summit!

Although we are yet to try ice-climbing, we do love to climb too!  Here we are climbing to some of the highest places in Nursery:

And here we are practising our balancing, just like Dani would have had to do at the top of the mountain:

Switzerland is also famous for its incredible train journeys.  Some of the trains even have glass roofs and restaurants so the passengers can see the views even more clearly while they eat their fancy food!  Do you recognise the mountain about halfway through the video (1.20)?

Finally, we read a story by John Burningham called Oi! Get Off Our Train.  This story is actually a very serious story about endangered animals and the impact humans are having on them.  It reminded us of the elephants we met in the elephant sanctuary in Thailand.

You can revisit it in this video below if you would like to:

We hope everyone is having a lovely weekend in the sunshine and see you on Monday.

I wonder where we will be heading off to next?