To the zoo with the Ferradou

We had a great day out at the zoo with our friends from Le Ferradou. Here are just a few photos from the day.

Leaf quilt

At the forest we saw so many lovely leaf shapes that we were inspired to make our own leaf artwork. We used a layering technique with a restricted a palette of forest colours - rusty reds, oranges, browns, yellows and greens.  We tried to leave the outline of the leaf and pattern of the veins white and let the paper show through. After each layer of paint we had to leave it to dry. Once we had layered on about 5 or 6 coats of paint we covered the whole thing in Indian ink. The teachers helped with this because the Indian ink is permanent. The last stage was to wash off the ink. In some places lots of the paint came off too and in other places not so much. The parts where we had left the paper bare took the black ink and showed the shape of our leaves.

Forêt de Bouconne

Our local forest is called la forêt de Bouconne. It is a short bus ride from our school and many of the children in Y2 live near the forest or pass it on their way to or from school. The forest covers 27km². It has a lake and lots of paths for walking, cycling and horse riding. Our trip was all about the flora and the fauna in the forest. The tree species we saw in the forest were oak, pine and sweet chestnut.  The forest is home to lots of animals but they mainly come out at night so we didn't see them. Our guide told us there are wild boar and roe deer. Other smaller mammal species too such as foxes and badgers. The short-toed eagle hunts around the forest.

Here are some photos of our trip:

Our World - a trip across the road to the WILD AREA

To begin our new IPC topic 'Our World' we visited a small wooded area across the road from our school. While we were there we did a mini-beast hunt, tried to identify the plants, trees and flowers and made our own Land Art.