Australia

We have family in Australia and my husband lived out there for a while as a child. Then realised that all the children had some sort of link with Australia or had friends about to go on holiday there, so thought it was a perfect time to do a theme on Australia.

We loved Diary of a Wombat, it's so funny, lovely illustrations had my children in fits of giggles and it got funnier the more time your read it too! We then enjoyed watching this clip on wombats, it is done my the children of Steve Irwin. We discovered they had done lots of videos, so we watched a few of the different animal ones that you might find in Australia, this wasn't all in one go but at different times throughout our theme.

I love reading and sharing books with the children,these are some of the books we used this time.

We spent some time looking at aboriginal art on the computer and the cards I had made up, the children then tried to create their own art, using cotton buds instead of paint brushes, with excellent results.

We watched some clips of Aboriginal dances, with some interesting attempts to do the dances themselves. Listened to some didgeridoo music, then listened to some more songs, nice list of songs can be found here including Waltzing Matilda

After reading Rainbow Bird, we used water colours to create rainbow patterns.

With the older children, well all the children but this was aimed more at the older ones, we looked at Australia and matched up where the different places were. The cards came from Montessori Print Shop these are a free download,  I also bought these which are lovely pictures of Australian animals and some facts about them.

Found were England was and were Australia was on the globe.

Used this book to look at Sydney Opera House, how it was built and some of the close up pictures of the architecture.