Since Christmas, Year Four have been using their geography skills to find out about the continent of Africa. We have created African dances in Sport lessons, sung African songs and created our own artwork in the style of an African artist called Gakonga. We first started by exploring artefacts from all over the continent and talked about what they told us about culture in Africa. We then invited parents from our class to bring in items of clothing to help us further understand how pattern and colour are used.
We then created our "Big Picture" to help us learn what we wanted to about Africa during the half term. Using this, we then went in to exploring Africa using atlases and digital mapping tools to understand what and where the Equator is, what the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn are and what the climate is like across Africa. We were surprised to find out that some parts of Africa are hot and wet, whereas parts are hot and dry. We were also surprised to find out that parts of Africa can become very cold.
We have also started to learn how to use longitude and latitude to find a place.