Primary 5S would like to thank Mr Keith Partridge for coming in to talk to them about his job as an adventure filmmaker.  Throughout his career he has worked for the BBC, Channel 4, the Discovery Channel, National Geographic and even in Hollywood so we were really lucky that he found the time to come into our class today.

Early last week we launched our learning context ‘Explorers’ by building a tent in groups whilst being timed.  We had a lot of fun and found that building a tent isn’t as easy as it looks and requires good teamwork and communication skills.

Before Keith visited, many of us pictured Bear Grylls when we thought of explorers.  Some of us thought that explorers “tried to survive on islands and tried to find food in the sea and land” whilst others thought that they “gathered together weapons and went out into the forests and tried to survive”.  We now know that explorers are people who “travel the world and go to unexplored habitats like parts of the Arctic” (Sophie),  “do amazing and sometimes dangerous things but are very skillful” (Freddie) and “explore different places like mountains, deserts, caves, unknown islands, the deep sea and space” (Fraser).

Keith told us about different aspects of survival including food, water, shelter, protection from the elements and the importance of everyone getting along and working together.  He showed us lots of amazing pictures of some his adventures which included him climbing to the summit of Mount Everest, sleeping on the side of a rock-face and abseiling down a waterfall.

We were surprised to learn that, contrary to what we first thought, explorers eat normal food on expeditions including tins of tuna, noodles, granola and crackers.  They also sometimes eat space food which we thought was pretty cool and Miss Spiers even had some to show us!

Mr Partridge’s visit was really inspiring and we can’t wait to learn more about different explorers as we continue to delve into our learning context.