This week, our travelling adventures continued as we jumped back onto our magic carpet and headed even further east.  We waved goodbye to Istanbul, buckled up our seatbelts and flew up, up and away over Iran and India to northern Thailand.

Miss Chandler has visited Thailand before and she told us all about her trip to visit the elephants who live in a sanctuary there.  We learnt that a sanctuary is a place where elephants can live safely protected from hunters.  She showed us some photos from her trip and told us that she fed the elephants bananas (which they ate whole including the skins) and one of them sprayed her with water from its trunk!

We decided to take a closer look at an elephant sanctuary so we entered ‘elephant nature park thailand’ into our magic carpet navigation system (aka Google Earth) and landed here:

We could see lots of trees, a river and some little huts.  When we came into land, we could see that the little huts were actually big umbrellas and lots of elephants were standing under them to shelter from the sun.  Another elephant was keeping cool in the river!

We then watched a video from the Nature Park to see some close ups of the elephants that live there:

And we read a delightful story by Susan Hellard about a Baby Elephant who gets into all sorts of trouble because she is not very good at listening…

You can revisit the story here:

Fortunately, our listening skills are much better that Ephra’s!  It must be because we play lots of games in Nursery to practise our listening and attention skills.  These skills help us to become confident communicators and form the foundation for the reading and writing skills we will learn in Reception next year.  This week, we focused especially on our body percussion skills: we played pass the clap (where you have to pass a clap all the way around a circle, listening very carefully so you know when it is your turn) and the mirror game (where you sit opposite your partner and listen carefully to the three sounds they make, e.g. clap, clap, stamp – then copy them).  Why not have a go at playing one of these games at home?

We also read the story of Commotion in the Ocean by Giles Andreae.  This is one of our absolute favourites at the moment because many of us are sea creature experts!  You can read this book again at home here:

Thailand is also famous for it’s beautiful beaches and sea-creatures.  Did you know that the world’s largest shark can be found in the waters around Thailand!  It is called a Whale Shark.  Why not see if you can spot it in this video…