Minibeasts

A new topic has emerged in my class that has captured almost everyones interest. It all started when M and C made a spider house which inspired E to make a box of caterpillars  which in turn motivated Z and J to make a home for lizards. I displayed their creations on top of a low bookshelf and J commented that it looked like a 'bug museum'. I agreed and asked what else might be displayed in a bug museum. He announced that he was a bit of an expert on museums because he went to them a lot and asked for a large sheet of paper so that he could draw his ideas.

I asked the children to share what they know about museums and we looked at some photographs of museum displays. We noticed that all the displays had lots of information to go with them and came to the conclusion that maybe we should find out a bit more about bugs so we could also do this.

A small group of children went around with my flip camera and asked their peers firstly what they knew about bugs and then what they wanted to learn. They had some interesting questions which we will endeavour to find the answers to. If you have 2 minutes to spare, have a listen to some of the things they said. It's very cute...

Dinosaur Land

Dinosaurs are all the rage in my class at the moment as many of my kids went to Walking with Dinosaurs last weekend. So we got out the dinosaurs and turned our water trough into Dinosaur Land! The kids decided we would need dirt and rocks and plants (although they didn't last very long - getting trampled almost instantly). After J bought in a movie of dinosaur photographs he had made with his mum one of my boys suggested that we should make our own Walking with Dinosaurs movie! I was thrilled and quickly got out my Flip camera.

He started filming his friends playing and the next day we used imovie on my computer to add music and words to his footage. Here's the movie he made:

He was absolutely wrapped with the result and it was super easy too! With a little help from me to write the words (I needed to get out the dinosaur dictionary to spell some of the dinosaur names that I'd never heard of before) he dragged and dropped his footage into the imovie template. We were done in about 10 minutes!