Friday with Ms Gain: More Mapping and Music

Today we read a story called ‘Possum Magic’ by Mem Fox, who is an Australian author. In this story 2 possums (Grandma Poss and Hush) travel around Australia in search of different types of food.

“They ate Anzac biscuits in Adelaide,
Mornay and minties in Melbourne,
Steak and salad in Sydney
And pumpkin scones in Brisbane….”

And in Darwin, “in the far north of Australia, […] they found a vegemite sandwhich.”

“Later in a beach in Perth, they ate a piece of pavlova” and
“In Hobart, late one night, in the kitchen of the casino, they saw a lamington on a plate. Hush close her eyes and nibbled”.

We used atlases to find all these Australian cities and put them on blank maps of Australia. We are becoming good at describing where cities are using the directions North, South, East, and West. We then drew some pictures of Australian animals that were mentioned in the book including: possums, koala bears, dingoes, wombats, emus, echindnas, kookaburras, kangaroos, and snakes.

Next we learnt about 2 important canals: The Panama Canal and the Suez Canal. The Panama Canal is between North and South America and allows a ship get from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean without having to go right around the bottom of South America. Then we looked at the Suez Canal, which is in Egypt and lets ships get from the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea and down to the Indian Ocean – what useful water passages!

After morning tea we went to the hall and did some music. We sat in a circle and everyone had percussion instruments. We had drums, castanets, claves, woodblocks, triangles, and bells. We then learnt a song about catching a turkey that has escaped from the barn. We used our instruments to help us sing along and at the end of the chorus we put our instruments down and ran around the circle singing “shoo turkey shoo shoo!”. When we stopped we picked up a new percussion instrument to play and did it again. It was a fun way to play lots of different instruments.

We also learnt a dance game called ‘Gold’ and ‘Silver’ where we held hands and danced in a line singing ‘London Bridge is Falling Down’. Two people were the bridge and the line of dancers danced through the gates until someone was caught as the bridge came down. When a dancer was caught they had to whisper to Ms Gain if they wanted to be ‘Gold’ or ‘Silver’ and she told them which of the two bridge holders to line up behind (no one knew till then which person was gold and which person was silver). It was lots of fun and ‘gold’ got the most people. In the olden days the two teams would have had a tug of war at the end but we just decided the team with the most people would win!