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Christ Church Primary School

Term 3 Spring 2022

Letters to Parents

Term 3 - Were Captain Scott and his crew good explorers?

Exploring artefacts to work out what we are learning about this term...

Mrs Proctor's trip to Finland in the Arctic Circle

Mrs Proctor surprised Finn and Elsa with a trip to Finland just before Christmas! We travelled to Saariselka in the very North of Finland inside the Arctic Circle. The weather was very cold and temperatures were as low as minus 12 to minus 20 degrees C!

When you arrive, you borrow special snowsuits, boots and mittens and you have to wear two pairs of trousers, two base layers, two mid layers, a jumper and a warm coat underneath the snowsuit to keep warm! You wear two pairs of socks and the boots are a size bigger so the air around your feet can warm up. Then you must wear a buff, woolly hat and mittens to protect your hands and face.

We enjoyed lots of fun snow activities including: husky sledging where Mrs Proctor got to drive the huskies through the frozen woods around a frozen lake, reindeer sleigh rides (one very special one led by Rudolph to meet Father Christmas in the forest), ice fishing, snow-mobile safaris, snow hockey, sledging, mini-skidoos, campfires, snowball fights and lots more!

It was a fantastic adventure to really experience life in the arctic. 24 hours with no sunrise/sunset in December so there are just 4 hours of light between 10-2 then it's pitch black again. Unfortunately we didn't get to see the Northern Lights despite being in the best area to view them at this time of year.

Fit4Kids fitness workshop

In our Fit4Kids workshop, we looked at food packaging to see the colour codes that show us how much sugar is in a product. We were very surprised, especially with breakfast cereals.

We did a warm up, fitness exercises to feel what it's like to be out of breathe and a cool down to stretch at the end.

Our weaving perseverance challenge

As part of our learning on perseverance, we are working hard to complete some weaving challenges in class. It is harder than it looks! When we make a mistake, we have to try again and again until it is correct.

Living Graphs in history

In our groups, we sequenced the events then looked at each event thinking about how Scott would feel at each stage of the final expedition. We made living graphs moving the pictures up if they were positive feelings and down if they were negative. Then we compared how each group had interpreted each event differently.

Watercolour Art - colour mixing and mark making

Edward Wilson Polar Workshop

Jo, our expert, was amazing today teaching us so much about Edward Wilson who was from Cheltenham We found out about his whole life and of course, the events of the fateful Terra Nova Expedition.

Polar Interview task - we pretended to interview Scott and Amundsen to ask them why they lost or won the Race to the South Pole

A Poetry Adventure - exploring poetry in English

History - Why did Scott fail to get to the South Pole first?

PE - Gymnastics - using the wall bars

Reindeer hide

Mrs Proctor brought in a piece of reindeer hide so we could feel how soft and warm it is. They have a fur coat with hollow tubular hairs that insulate from the cold. Reindeer skins were used in Scott's Terra Nova expedition and we know Captain Oates had a reindeer fur sleeping bag.