Arrrrrrrrrr!

Pirates!

In Year One we have been learning about Pirates! We met Pirate Pete who has taught us all sorts of things that we would need to know to make good Pirates! 

Pirate Pete sent us lots of non-fiction books and information about being a Pirate! We looked carefully through the information and picked out the most interesting bits and we then created our own non-fiction texts about Pirates. Pirate Pete also taught us about direction and rotation as these are skills he uses a lot when he sails his ship! We have also had to do lots of counting in 2s, 5s and 10s as this is a quicker way to count the gold coins you find in treasure chests! 

When we first starting talking about Pirates we thought that they only collected gold coins and jewels. We have learnt that they also find objects that are useful to them on the ship! We looked at the continents of the world and the oceans and where the Pirates found some of their treasure. 

We have really enjoyed looking at treasure maps and decided we wanted to make our own! We thought about some of the features of maps and designed our own fantasy treasure island. We wrote letters to Pirate Pete to instruct him where he would find the treasure on our islands! We dipped our letters and maps in a mixture of coffee and tea to make them look old!

We enjoyed drawing our treasure maps so we decided to create our own 3D treasure islands using salt dough! We shaped our islands and added features such us lakes, volcanoes, mountains and caves. We left the salt dough islands in the sun to dry out and then we chose the appropriate colours to paint our islands. They look great!

In our independent learning time we had to follow instructions carefully to create this fun parrots! 

We worked as a team to make our own Pirate ship! We started with some paper, paint and a big cardboard box and we were able to create this brilliant ship!

We compared Pirate ships to modern day boats. We found out who Ellen MacArthur is and compared a Pirate ship to the boat she sailed around the world in when she complete the Vendee Globe Race. We thought how brave Ellen must have been to have sailed all the way around the world on her own! She was only 24 years old and it took her 94 days! 

We also compared the types of clothes sailors wore in the past to the clothes they wear now. We even got to try some on...although it was a little on the big side!

In Literacy we have started to look at Poetry and decided to write poems about the beach! Miss Burge brought in a very smelly bag of things she found at the beach which gave us some great ideas for our writing. We looked at the features of acrostic poems and we have really enjoyed thinking of lines for our poems which start with the right letters! 

We created our own tissue paper beach collage to present with our poems.