Austin's Adventure

Rationale: Austin has disappeared! He has taken himself off on holiday in his hot air balloon to visit his family in Borneo. The children are inspired to find out about Borneo and receive photos and messages from Austin to help their search. Austin then announces that he now wants to explore the world! The children follow Austin on his really big adventure and discover a wealth of information about each country he visits: carefully selected by the interests and family history of the children, quality books about the world and varying environments. Together we notice the similarities and differences in the environment, animals, weather, houses, food, clothing and cultures of each country and celebrate our wonderful world.

Hook: Austin has disappeared! He has sent a postcard telling us where he is.

Borneo

We came back from the half term holiday and discovered Austin has disappeared! Then we received a postcard in our register.

Austin has gone to visit his family in Borneo. We decided to write our own postcards to Austin telling him about our holidays.

We looked at altases, maps, globes and Google Earth to find where Austin is and compare that to where we are. We labelled Borneo on our world map.

Special countries

Like Austin, we have countries and places that are special to us and our friends. We tried to guess what country and place was special to each friend before finding the place on the map.

Austin has decided he wants to travel the world but has crashed his hot air balloon again. We suggested different vehicles he could travel in. However he decided he wanted his own special mode of transport and asked us to design a vehicle for him.

Some of our friends made their own ways of travelling.

We have been investigating constellations and looking at different ones from around the world in our science area.

We were inspired to make our own constellation viewers.

Antarctica

We arrived at school to another postcard from Austin, a photograph of him and a suitcase. He has travelled to Antarctica and is exploring the snow and icebergs.

In his postcard, Austin told us he was cold and needed some more clothes. We looked in his suitcase but found that not all the items were suitable for Antarctica. We sorted the clothes into clothes for hot weather and clothes for cold weather before packing the cold weather clothes to send to Austin.

We wrote lists of clothes to pack for a cold place.

After reading fiction and non fiction books about animals in Antarctica, we looked at the British Antarctic Survey's webcams to see what animals we could see.

We were inspired to draw pictures of the animals and landscape.

In our Science investigation area we learnt about tea around the world and experimented to make the best cup of tea.

Africa

Austin sent us another email to say he has made it to the African Savannah. We thought about what clothes he might now need. In exploring time, we have been looking at maps and were inspired to make our own maps of Austin's adventure.

We read the story Handa's Surprise and wrote captions.

After finding out about the environment and animals of the African savannah, we drew pictures.

Portugal & UK

Austin sent us objects for us to guess where they came from. We then learnt all about life in Portugal. We particularly enjoyed finding out about the different foods.

Austin then sent us some photographs. He told us he had arrived in the UK but was lost. We needed to look and see if his photographs looked like where we live. These photographs included Welsh mountains, Scottish islands, English farms, Edinburgh, London and North Camp.

Outcome

After reading 'Me on the Map' and finding out about our place in the world, Austin sent us some clues to tell us where he was. He was at school and had hidden some instructions so we could find him.

We were excited to hear about his adventure and to tell him about ours.

Home learning

We took a toy on a journey and made a poster about the adventure.