Year 3 - Is there chewing gum in St Lucia?

Year 3 made the epic journey to the otherside of the world to study exotic St Lucia. The children’s map reading skills were tested as they created a 3D map of the Caribbean island through identifying features they think are important. When children create something as a team, our students make excellent progress. Balancing many people’s creative ideas, skills and knowledge is certainly not easy, but giving our children the chance to exercise themselves is so vitally important to us. We saw capitals and villages carefully mapped out with gemstones, rivers of pipe cleaners, dense forests denoted by coloured feathers and deep, rich pools of tissue paper. This land was theirs.

Taking children away from the classroom - and even their local area - is an important exercise. Gateway School children have a huge thirst for knowledge and a wide breadth of skills to draw from to investigate their own questions. Immersing them in an unknown place, allows them to exercise geography and history skills and cultural understanding simultaneously.

We have already started answering our own queries, such as: ‘Why do you have so many trees?’ and ‘Which part of St Lucia is the marina on?’ but we have a bit more digging to do until we find whether they have chewing gum or not. Nurturing these inquiring minds and listening to their thoughtful observations is always at the core of our education and we are proud of the achievements of Year 3 already.