Just before Christmas, Year 2 had a very exciting opportunity to travel on The Polar Express!
We had spotted some tracks on the carpet about a week before and wondered what might come along them. One day, Year 2 were sitting in the library with Miss C’s sidekick Mrs H. reading some books when in I ran with exciting news for the children: The Polar Express had just pulled in!
Of course, Jonathan was all over this and was dressed up as a conductor. (He was also wearing his shark costume from our toys topic fun!) He was stood at the door checking our tickets.
Once inside, the children found a train! All aboard! The conductor shouted and we took our seats. (YouTube have some great footage of real snowy train journeys that I used). Along the way we saw snowy mountains, howling wolves and lights in the distance which turned out to be the North Pole!
We even had ‘hot chocolate’ fudge served to the famous song from the film.
When we reached the North Pole, the train came to a standstill and we all got off to explore. We even made footprints in some crunchy snow (great timing of the real snow about a week before! I collected a load and kept it in my freezer!) Back on the train and we saw Santa and his elves!
Much fun was had by all and we generated lots of lovely language to describe all of the things we had seen, tasted, smelt, touched and heard. The Polar Express book is filled with similes so we included lots of these and wrote some brilliant recounts of our trip!
I think my favourite simile was, ‘The lights of the North Pole twinkled in the sky like the first firework on Bonfire Night.’ Just wonderful!
The Anatomy of Teaching 