We're All Going To The Zoo! Autumn 1 2025
We're All Going To The Zoo!
Autumn 1 2025
Science, English and Art
Geography and DT
Thinking and Spirituality
RATIONALE:
After receiving the message from Zoe the new zookeeper and exploring the box of goodies, the children will discover many animal related stories, games and toys but not much information. They will read the books, starting with Dear Zoo and begin to investigate zoo animals. They will use scientific ideas to sort and classify animals, learning about their groups and natural habitats. They will make fact files about the animals. The children will write their own version of Dear Zoo, using some of the new animals they discover. In order to help Zoe they will design a new zoo and make clay animals to fill it, showing why they are arranged in particular groups. After reading Poo at the Zoo – the children will think about the role of the zookeeper and design adverts for their zoo. All this information will be collated and given to Zoe to help her with her new job!
HOOK:
Zoe the New Zookeeper sends a message to say that she would like Emerald Class’ help to design a new zoo. This is a brand new job which she has never had before! She will need to know as much information as possible about the animals and where they live. Zoe has sent a box of zoo goodies to get you started. Can you send everything you find out to her so she can make a good impression for her exciting new post.
Concluding hook: Visit to Marwell Zoo to find out about how other zoos are organised.
We have learnt how to group animals into mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, amphibians and insects. We look at the different features each group had before deciding where the animals belonged. Some animals were tricky to place! Did you know that a whale is a mammal? It has live young and comes to the surface to breath air.
We have enjoyed sharing Dear Zoo by Rod Campbell. Using animal masks we sequenced the story!
We have become artists and have started learning how to produce sculptures from clay. First we kneaded the clay, rolled a ball and flattened it out. We made a tile and then looked at different animal skin patterns. We used different tools to make patterns in the clay, lines, stripes, circles and lots of other shapes!
We have learned to group the animals is lots of different ways - today we found out about their natural habitats. All animals are suited to their habitat, it has the things they need to survive.
Painting our skin patterned clay tiles. We looked carefully at the colours of the animals and painted our tiles! We used different size brushes and mixed colours making them lighter and darker by adding black or white.
Animal sculptures! We chose a zoo animal to sculpt from clay. We looked at how to join, smooth and add patterns to the clay. We made some very detailed
Marwell Zoo - we had a fantastic trip to the zoo, spotting so many different animals, looking at the patterns on their skin and finding out more about them by sharing the fact information cards. We were extremely lucky with the weather too!
