The Land of Fire and Ice

This half term Year 3 have been learning all about Iceland.

We have studied folklore, and in particular, elves.  We have also learnt about folk dancing, volcanoes, Icelandic art and the type of clothing needed for the Icelandic climate.

In class we tried Icelandic folk dancing and designed our own Icelandic jumpers. This was great fun and allowed us to get really creative.

Here are Woodpecker class rehearsing our folk dance...

Some of our jumper designs...

We also looked at Icelandic art and were lucky enough to be visited by artist, Anna Dora. Anna originates from Iceland and showed us some of her amazing paintings. She taught us some interesting techniques and we used our new skills to create our own fantastic paintings. It was really good fun and very messy!!

We had some very exciting news recently, Anna's painting, that we were so lucky enough to see in class, is now being displayed in a gallery in New York!!

Towards the end of our topic we learnt about volcanoes and were able to watch some fascinating videos of volcanoes erupting. We then used our newly learned painting techniques again to create our own interpretation of an erupting volcano.

As part of our topic evaluation Woodpecker class had the following to say:-

Dan said "I enjoyed learning lots of Icelandic words, such as mummy, daddy, yes, no, please and thank you."

Alec said "I enjoyed Anna Dora coming in, it was spectacular that she brought in a great big painting and the time with Anna was fun."

Alice said "I liked it when we did our painting with Anna, it was so fun. Anna is the best painter ever.  She painted the Northern Lights and the Blue Lagoon Spa in one picture!"

Freddy said "I liked the Icelandic folk dance because I had a very nice partner and I liked it when we went up and down the line!"

George said "I liked learning about volcanoes because we got to create a volcano out of paint and we also got to watch videos of volcanoes erupting. We had to label a diagram of a volcano too."

Winona said "My favourite part was creating our Icelandic jumpers because I like drawing and being creative."

Val said "I liked it when Anna Dora came in because she helped us with speaking Icelandic and she did art with us."

For our finale we invited our parents into school to share what we had learned. We exhibited our beautiful paintings and demonstrated an Icelandic folk dance.

Hopefully we have convinced a few families to visit Iceland in the future!