We have had a very busy few weeks in Second Class. We have been working under the theme of China and have completed so much work that we are very excited to share with you. We began our learning by spending a large number of lessons researching and discovering all about Chinese people, landmarks, culture, food, schooling etc. We completed several country fact files, each exploring a different aspect of life in China.
In History, we learned all about the Great Wall of China. We learned some amazing, interesting facts that left all the kids wishing to visit this historic place when they are older. To empathise with the millions who built the wall and the huge engineering feat that it was, we undertook a very exciting STEM challenge to build our very own walls. These walls needed to be structurally sound and needed to hold weight. With all the resources in the classroom available to the children, they needed to be strategic in what materials they chose and how they wished to use them. Each group spent some time planning and mapping the materials they would choose to use and how they planned to construct these. Have a look at the results of our group work!
Our own great walls!
In Learn Together we learned all about the Chinese New Year. We looked at how the Chinese celebrate and compared this to the celebration of New Year in Ireland. To mark this, we undertook a collaborative art project. Each child designed a piece for our collaborative dragon. We each learned how to write our names in Chinese and used these as our signatures for our art. When we combined our work together as a class, we created a giant, movable Chinese dragon. Our dragon is now hanging proud in our classroom!
In Maths, we completed a challenge with Chinese tangrams. I am always so impressed with the problem solving abilities of Second Class.
In English, we have been learning all about newspaper articles and the language that makes an article effective for the reader. We became journalists for a day and created a front page article for 'Stepaside News' on the discovery of an ancient Chinese Pot by a man from Stepaside. We were asked to examine the pot in close detail and ensure that the readers could visualise the pot easily through very descriptive writing. We had great fun with this fun challenge of the story of 'Martin Griffin and his Ancient Pot'! Have a look!
In music, we learned about the traditional Chinese instrument; the rattle drum. We constructed out own rattle drums and made some great classroom noise with our completed pieces!
