Friday with Ms Gain

Today was a busy day! As well as trips to the hall for production practice we did some fun activities as part of our Flat Stanley project.

A RULER OF BRITISH HISTORY: Kings, Queens, Years, and Roman Numerals

Olivia’s Flat Stanley arrived back from staying with family friends in Portsmouth England with a ruler of British History. This ruler had the names and dates of all the Kings and Queens of England. Using photocopies of the ruler we worked in pairs to count up the numbers of Kings and Queens with the same name.

We then put this information into a graph. Edward and Henry were the most common names for a King, there have been 8 King Edwards and 8 King Henrys. Henry and Edward in Room 2 thought this was pretty neat!

We also practised reading years starting with 2010 and counting backwards to the year 2000. We then counted backwards in hundreds till we got back as far as 1000, which is as far back as the Kings/Queens of England on the ruler went.

We also noticed that after each King or Queen’s name on the ruler there were some symbols, which we learnt were Roman numerals. These Roman numerals showed whether the King/Queen was the first with that name or the second or third etc. We learnt how to read and write Roman numerals up to 10.

We enjoyed working out and writing the answers to questions using Roman numerals such as “if the next King was a George what would he be called?” (King George the Seventh). Room 2 were very quick to learn how to write Roman numerals and to commit to memory how many Henrys, Edwards, Georges etc there had been –they answered questions like this with amazing speed!

THE VOYAGES OF CAPTAIN COOK: Developing our expertise in reading world maps.

We then looked at a world map that mapped the three voyages made by Captain Cook on his explorations of the Southern Oceans. We used our fingers to trace the three different journeys and identified all the different continents/countries that he passed by and collected information about, including New Zealand and his discovery of the Cook Strait. We used our ruler to find out who the King of England was that encouraged Captain Cook’s voyages of exploration during the years 1768 – 1779: King George the Third.

There were a lot of questions about Captain Cook and his boat, which was called the HMS Endeavor. Some things we want to find out are: what did the people on the boat eat? How did they get their food? How many people were on the boat? What did the different people on the boat do? Were there any children on the boat?/Cabin boys? We will have to do some research!

JAPAN

Next week Mrs Fields who works in the library is coming to talk to us about Japan, where her son Tim lives. We sent one of our class Flat Stanleys to him in Osaka, Japan, and he has sent it back with lots of photos. Mrs Fields is going to talk to us some more about her own trip to Japan and show us some maps. Today we learnt that Japan has 4 islands and that the biggest is called Honshu. Tokyo and Osaka are 2 major cities on the island of Honshuu. We coloured in maps of Japan showing the 4 different islands.