Recycling and our time capsule

 

Here are some items we recycled

 

We recycled clothes to make cushions, bags, aliens, a two headed sea monster, a glove puppet and some head rests.....We used an old magazine and some bottle tops to make modern art.

 

Can you guess what these items were?

 

Time Capsule

 

We also put together some items this term which represent our lifestyle today.  Theoretically this could be buried for a future archeologist to discover.  When we made the time capsule we talked about life without mobile phones, cars, manufactured goods and electric lighting.  We watched a film of the novel 'The Railway Children' which was written in 1905.

 

 

Letters to Malawi

Some of the secondary year 6 and 7 pupils from the European School are going on an expedition to Malawi in July.

World Challenge Visit.

As part of the expedition they will be doing some charitable work with school children in Malawi.

We have written letters to the school children telling them about our lives here in Luxembourg.

We're hoping that they will reply to our letters and that we can begin to exchange information with them and get to know what it's like in Malawi.

We're hoping to have penfriends in Malawi which we can keep contact with in the future.

Mrs Thorogood can't post the letters as we use our real names.  Here are some extracts:

Caring for the Environment

Save energy and recycle.

Here are some information posters about how to protect the environment and prevent pollution.

Take the bus.

Recycling workshop

We are going to make some things using recycled materials brought in from home.

 

Don't throw things away ...

 

recycle them!

 

Here is a list of things that we need:

 

 

 

We can make some little ornamental toys from gloves, felt and buttons.

 

We can make puppets out of old socks.

 

We can also make bags out of some old cut off jeans (small).

 

We can make cushions out of an old T shirt (small).

 

We can also make some collages using pictures from magazines, beads, buttons and bottle tops..

 

We can also make paper maché pots and paint them from old newspaper.

Our Time Capsule and some pictures of things from life in Edwardian England

We're making a time capsule.  This is a box of things to bury which would tell people in the future how we live today. 

Here is a picture of a Roman pot.
It was broken so we had to put the pieces together a bit like a jigsaw.  Many things found that have been left in the ground for many years get broken or decay over time.  It is the job of an archeologist to dig these up and interpret them so that we can understand how ordinary people used to live.

We talked about how people lived in the time of the railway children and how things have changed over time with inventions like the mobile phone and the motor car.

Here are some pictures of things which were different in Edwardian England (around 1905 when the novel the Railway Children was written):

There were no cars.  People travelled by horse drawn carriages.

People used gas lamps and candles for light and styles of clothing were very different.  People wore formal hats.

People travelled by train.  These were very much slower than they are today, especially the TGV!  They were known as steam trains.  Coal fires were used to heat pressurised water to make steam.

Happiness is...

After we watched the Railway Children and talked about what made their lives happier in the countryside, we talked about the things that make us happy.

Here are some of them:

The Railway Children

What makes us happy?

In class we watched the 1970s film of 'The Railway Children'.  This is based on the classic novel by E Nesbitt written in 1905.  It tells the story of three children whose lives are torn apart when their Father is wrongly accused of a crime.  They are very wealthy but become poor.  They move from a big house in London, where they have expensive toys and servants, to a tiny cottage in the countryside.

At first they find their change in circumstances difficult but they learn to be happy without the material wealth they had in London.  They are very interested in the local railway and become friends with the railway porter.  They are much more closely connected to the real world and to ordinary people.  They start to do good deeds and to help others and find happiness in a simpler lifestyle.  However, life is not easy though as they don't always have enough food or heating in their cottage.

The children with the railway porter

In the end, there is a happy reunion as their Father is proved innocent and released from prison.

We talked about how their lives were at the beginning of the novel and how their lives changed.  We asked the question 'were they happier in London or in the countryside?'.

Most of the class thinks that the railway children's lives were better and happier in the countryside because:

• they did better things;
• they helped people;
• they made friends and got involved with other people; and
• their lives were more real.