One day Ms Fothergill told us that we weren’t going to write our weekend recounts in the usual way. Instead of drafting a story in our books we were going to draft pictures and then a script.
After we drafted the pictures we chose which comic layout we wanted to use and published our pictures. Then Ms Fothergill used her cell phone to record our scripts. Then she put them together in a voicethread.
Ms Fothergill likes to geocache as a hobby and owns a special cache called a stargate. This means she gets lots of parcels sent to her from overseas. Today she brought one into school and we got to look at all the travel bugs. These are coins or small toys that travel around the world visiting caches.
Yesterday we had a visit from Greg the Park Ranger. We learned lots of interesting facts including:
* Sometimes forest fires are good
* Flamingos can be white or pink or red
* Flamingos eat pink shrimp which turns them pink
* This is a handy rhyme to remember: “Red and yellow, deadly fellow; red and black, friend of Jack”
* The highest point of the Everglades is only 3ft high! – It’s also very flat.
* People used to eat flamingos so there aren’t many left
* The Everglades is a National Park (1.5 million acres)
* The animals aren’t in cages or behind fences
* It’s the only place in the world where crocodiles and alligators share the same habitat
* Atlantic dolphins visit the Everglades during winter
* We think it should be called ‘Animal Land’ because of all the animals there
* If you walk through the Everglades at night with red cellophane over your torch you see lots of crocodile eyes watching you
* No one has ever been eaten by crocodiles there
* Greg regularly sees around 100 alligators on his walk to work in the mornings
* They have snakes there
* There are over 100 different types of birds
* Baby crocs make a hmm type of noise to call their mother
* Baby crocs are sometimes carried around in their mother’s mouth
* The Blue Heron is as tall as Eli and has a wing span of 6ft
* Greg has never seen a panther (even though they are there in the Everglades)
* Instead of “Ducks crossing” signs like we see in New Zealand, he sees “Panthers crossing” signs