The Dragon visited us last night and left us some new things. All our “Jack and the Beanstalk” books have been replaced by “Goldilocks and the 3 Bears.” He also left us some new puppets and masks to play with!
There was also another surprise. Our reading area has turned into a castle with a dragon and a Frog Prince!
We read the Goldilocks big book. Then, some of us put pictures of the story in order and wrote sentences to match. Others wrote newspaper articles. We had to answer the questions who, what, when and where when we wrote them.
On Wednesday, we were all very excited to find the Dragon had left us another letter and a present!
In his letter, the dragon told us that he had heard that we are learning about measurement in maths, and that he wanted to set us a challenge.
He sent us some sheets of paper with an outline of the Giant’s hand. In the bags were magic beans.
First, we had to ESTIMATE how many beans would fit on the Giant’s palm (we knew from our Halloween maths that an estimate is a sensible guess). We had to write down our estimates in pen so we could not change them later!
Then we arranged our magic beans on the Giant’s palm to find out the actual number. Finally, we worked out the difference between our estimates and the actual number, using our calculators.
After that, we drew the outline of our own hand on the Giant’s and did the same again, only for our hand this time.
We really enjoyed the Dragon’s challenge and hope he will send us some more.
The Dragon wrote to let us know that he loved the posters that we made yesterday.
We are trying to make our beanstalk bigger. We made some more leaves when we had finished our maths and cut them out so they are ready to be added to the beanstalk.
Mrs Bailey brought us in some more books. One of them is called “Daft Jack and the Bean Stack.” We are about half way through it and we are really enjoying it. We think it is quite funny.
We talked about the main features of a book cover. We looked at the different “Jack” stories that we have in class and discussed what we liked about them and why.
We designed our own book covers.
In the afternoon we tried acting out parts of the story using mime. Then we worked in small groups and improvised and added some dialogue to our scene. We learned that we have to use nice loud voices and remember to face our audience when we are performing.
He thanked us for the letters we wrote to him yesterday.
He had left us a table of books, some Jack and the Beanstalk puppets, some masks and a CD to listen to!
We read one of the books – “Jack and the Bean Pie.” In this book, the giant prefers to eat the tasty bean pies Jack makes rather than people. Most of the Superstars preferred this version to the original!
We worked with our talking partners to discuss the similarities and differences between the two books. We organised the information into a Venn diagram on the whiteboard.
In our ICT lesson, we made posters advertising Jack’s cow or the bean pies for sale. We had to open either the “cow” or “pie” document in Publisher, insert a picture from clipart and change the font and size and colour of the text. Mrs Stewart is really pleased with the way we are becoming much more independent in using and applying our computer skills.
Just before home time, some of the boys gave us an impromptu performance of “Jack and the Beanstalk” using the roleplay masks. It was very good!
Today, something vey exciting happened. We opened the classroom door and found a trail of sparkly glitter leading to a letter on the table.
Some of us thought it might be from Santa and others thought it was from the Easter Bunny!
Well … we were all wrong! The letter was from a Dragon! His fairytale home has disappeared and he and all his fairytale friends have no homes. In his letter, the dragon asked us if we could rebuild Fairyland in our classroom and read lots of Fairytales as well. Of course we were very excited.
We thought we might have to have a wee break from our usual work for while, so we asked Mr Haxton if that would be ok. He agreed that we had a very important job to do!
First of all, we wrote back to the dragon.
After playtime, we read “Jack and the Beanstalk.” Mrs Stewart told us that sometimes the same story can be told in different ways. We are going to look at different versions of fairytales.
We started work on a beanstalk for Jack. We painted, sponged, printed and drew leaves with crayons and pastels, using lots of different shades of green. The beanstalk hs started to grow around our classroom door and into the classroom.