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Earlier this week was the latest speaking and listening group and the theme for this one was ‘Cities and Buildings’.
I wasn’t sure how to approach this theme with Daniel and Em, so I got them to take a look at the fab City Atlas book and see if anything took their eye there. Em decided she wanted to do Moscow and Daniel was a little unsure, but once he spotted my Little Duck virtual run medals of Paris he opted to learn more about Paris.
What is a City?
I wanted to start by getting the children to think about cities, what they are and how they’re built. We talked about Manchester (our home City) and some of the other cities that we have visited and the sorts of things they have in common. It was a good opportunity to introduce some new vocabularly such as ‘urban’ and ‘rural’.
We had a think about the sorts of things that we might find in cities and then read a new book (gifted by the publisher) call ‘How to Build a City‘. This is a clever book that shows how a city develops and how services develop as populations grow. We then watched a couple of YouTube videos of different cities across the world, and talked about wealthy cities and poorer cities.
We then looked at another really brilliant book called Manhattan too which talks about how Manhattan grew from a natural formation into the city it is today. It looks at the effects of natural disasters as well as immigration and the slave trade. A really interesting book about a fascinating city.
Our Projects
With our projects I got the children to identify the countries that their cities sit in, so France for Daniel and Russia for Moscow and we looked where they were on the map. I then got them to identify some of the key buildings on their chosen cities.
Daniel chose the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame and The Arc De Triomphe to look at in more detail and Emma chose Red Square, the Kremlin and St Basil’s Cathedral.
Paris
For the Paris project I printed some items from Twinkl for Daniel to use, these included colouring sheets and fact files for him to glean information from. I also really like this news article about the Notre Dame fire which was useful for him in terms of reading it and then answering some questions about it.
We printed some page borders off and he wrote a little about the Arc De Triomphe based on some research we did on the Internet. He chose some pictures from the internet and we added these to his project book.
Moscow
Moscow was a slightly easier city for us to do as it’s a city that Damian and I have visited. We talked about Red Square and using a colouring sheet from Activity Village and the Lonely Planet Travel book she completed a nice picture to add to her project.
She then wrote a little about St Basil’s Cathedral and then about the Kremlin. We talked a lot about the different architecture and how the buildings looked very different (and much more colourful!) than the buildings we see at home.
She wrote a little about Red Square and we drew a map to show where the various attractions and key points of interest are in the square, as well as printing a couple of pictures off from mine and Damian’s trip for her to show.
Sharing with Friends
The children all presented their projects back to the group, and we enjoyed learning about Bruges, Stratford-Upon-Avon, Amsterdam and the Burj Khalifa. It’s always really lovely to see and hear the different projects that they come up with and to see the interest that the children take in each others work.
