Maps, maps, maps!

Over the last few weeks the children have been interested in making maps. Look at Yasmen’s great map to school!

We started with learning about the countries that our families come from. We learnt that members of our family were born in England, Scotland, the Caribbean, Lithuania, Pakistan, Sudan, Eritrea, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, the Congo and Ghana and we wanted to learn some dances from other cultures.

Then the children made their own maps. There were maps to the jungle, maps to get home, maps to see the princesses and even maps of our own pretend planets!

After that we moved on to story maps and the children drew some great maps to go with their stories. We even made some books on the computer.

Our story telling continued as Andy the story teller came to tell stories with us…

What a busy week! The children have loved learning about maps and lots of children carried on making maps while they played. Why not encourage children to make more maps as they play at home. They are great for teaching children about the world around them and learning about where things are.

Global Citizenship

This week is Global Citizenship week in school.

We have been doing different activities to help us understand; own actions and how they affect others, where we live and where other places are, living things and their needs.

First we thought about ourselves and where we lived.

We used maps and a globe to look at the world and find out where we live and where people who are important to us live.

Next we used boxes to show our place in the world. We had a big box that said ‘earth’ and smaller boxes inside showing the country and city that we live in and our area in the city.

Then we talked about people who live in different areas and cities. We matched photos of Sheffield and England to the right boxes.

After that we sang a song about where we live.

Then we thought about other places in the world. We looked at our clothes and toys and find out that some had come from very far away! Then we looked at the labels on our snack and used the map to find the countries our fruit had come from.

Next we thought about right and wrong and being fair.

In our maths area we shared things out unfairly then tried to share them out fairly.

We talked about how it felt when things weren’t fair and other things we didn’t think were fair. We talked about our class rules in nursery and what happens when we do something unkind. Then children shared what happens when they make the wrong choice at home.

Finally we thought about living things. We spent some time looking after our class snail Gary.

We gave him some more vegetables from our mud kitchen and a spray of water. We decided that looking after Gary would be somebody’s special job each day. Then we thought about the living things outside. We looked at the plants and flowers that were starting to grow and watered them to help them grow.

Global Citizenship week has taught us about: 

Our place in the world, things that are close to us and things that are far away.

What it means when something is fair or unfair and how that makes us feel.

How we have an important job to look after living things like plants and animals.