Our exciting 'Blue Planet' learning theme gave us an insight into the weird and wonderful creatures that live deep down in the world's oceans. We started our Geography unit by making sure we could all name and locate the world's five main oceans. We then learnt about how humans are damaging the oceans due to the amount of plastic we are using. Although plastic is a cheap and efficient material to make a whole host of items we use everyday, it is harming our oceans and the marine life that lives in them. Plastic can take over 450 years to bio-degrade and 8 million tonnes of it ends up in our oceans every year! Plastic waste traps animals, some eat it by accident and it also contaminates human food supplies (as we eat the fish who have eaten the waste). To spread the word about what people can do to reduce plastic pollution, we created sea creatures made from recycled materials to go on a display in each of our classrooms, along with information about how people could help. We also designed posters about plastic pollution and learnt about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an area of the Pacific Ocean that is full of plastic waste thanks to the ocean currents. We also did a litter survey in our playground to see what material we found the most of - we were all shocked about how much plastic we found! We even learnt to draw a bar graph to present our findings. 

Following the theme of recycling, we were really excited to have Creaturama visit us in school to deliver workshops about how to make incredible 3D models, all made from recycled materials. All of KS1 created their very own sea creature sculpture made from waste items such as plastic bottles and cereal boxes, all covered in newspaper and painted to make them look incredibly professional! In Art Lessons, we also looked at the sculptures of Giaccometti and used them to inspire our very own clay sea creature sculpture. 

In English this half term, we have been working hard to expand the range of conjunctions we use to extend our sentences and also to write accurately in the past tense, including irregular past tense verbs. We wrote our own version of the Angler Fish Chase Scene in Finding Nemo and tried hard to use a range of descriptive vocabulary to make our writing exciting. We also leant how to use apostrophes for contraction and possession. 

Our Music work this half term also linked to Finding Nemo. We started by listening to a range of tuned and untuned percussion instruments and we talked about how the timbre of each one could be used to represent different sea creatures. We then looked at the use of dynamics and tempo to change the mood of a piece of music. The unit culminated in us composing a group piece of music to accompany the Angler Fish scene from Finding Nemo. We even created a group graphic score to remind us when to play each instrument.

We are incredibly proud of our brilliant ocean topic book covers. We used tints and shades of blue to give the impression of depth under the ocean and than carefully cut black silhouettes of sea creatures to stick over the top so it looks as if we are looking up from the bottom of the ocean.