A Very Hot Day

It was a very hot day in our part of Australia today! The forecast was for 42 degrees celcius (107f), but we'll have to watch the News tonight to see what it got to. We made sure we drank lots and lots of water. We wished we were in the Northern Hemisphere where it is snowing!

We've done lots and lots of writing today! First thing this morning, in Daily Writing, the topic that we picked out of our writing ideas box, was a picture of a pot of gold. This was an exciting subject to write about! Here is Meg's story:

A Pot of Gold
One day, I saw a rainbow and I followed it and I found a pot of gold. We were really rich! We got a lot of stuff and we didn't waste any money and we really thought about it. We had a lot of fun, but a leprechaun jumped out and said "This is all my gold!"
By Meg

Our other writing activity today was starting the planning stage of our photo stories. The other day, we walked around our school, looking for places we'd like to include in our stories. Today, we drew them on our planning sheet. Some of us had time to start our draft stories too. Here are Ella, Alex and Joel's photo plans.

In Maths, we learned about halves. We noticed that sometimes we need to really study the shape to work out what the fairest and best way to halve something is.

We answered some more questions from our Kentucky friends, about our lunches. We also asked them some questions!  We wanted to know what is in a quesadilla and we asked about corn dogs. We're going to be sending them some Vegemite. They are going to send us something to try too!

Love from The Smarties & Mrs N

Mrs M's First Blog

Buona sera! We went to Italian today and got a marshmallow icecream. They were yummy! We learnt about greetings for different times of the day, too. Mrs C. came to visit and we talked about insects that bite and sting. Then we listed them into our health books and drew pictures about them. In music we learnt a story called "Under the sea". We made up sounds with our voices to match the story. We got Freddo Frogs for Joshua's birthday. Thanks Joshua! Taj bought an air rocket for news today and Josh showed a Lego Batman Playstation game he got for his birthday. Mrs M bought us lollies from the Lolly Warehouse in Brisbane. They were fish and crocodile lollies. During 'Think Pair Share' we talked about places we have visited. Catherine told us about Ireland, Noah told about Bali and Mrs P told us about her trip to America. We have had a very busy day.

Love from The Smarties and Mrs M

Group Work

This afternoon we did some activities in our groups. We rotated around so that we could all get a turn at everything. One group was making pictures by tracing around shape tiles.  Charlee made a picture of a flower, Isaac made a Transformer and Indi made a bird. The next group was playing Yes/No games. We had a set of cards each and they all had questions on them that could only be answered by a "yes" or a "no". We had to read each question and carefully think about what the right answer was. We then put the question card on the Yes or No pile. The last group was a Maths group with Mrs C. We were learning about ordinal numbers, which is where we say things like "first" and "second" and "third".

Today, we also continued our Venezuela Lunch Exchange. We can't wait to see what they are eating for lunch! We did some more work on our monster descriptions. They're almost done!

Mrs M will be back to teach us tomorrow. We're going to see if she will help us do a blog post. It will be her first one!

Love from The Smarties

The Smarties Reporters!

Today marked the start of our next lunch project, this time with Venezuela! We looked on the map to find out where it is. We saw that it's in South America and we also found out that they speak Spanish there. Last week, we learned that the things children eat in America are a little different to ours. We wonder how different the foods our friends in Venezuela eat will be. Keep an eye on our wiki to find out what we learn!

Now that we've been writing blog posts as a whole class activity for a few weeks, we decided that we were ready to start writing them ourselves sometimes. Our class reporters today are Alex, Indi and Kiara. Here are their recounts of what we did in Year 2 today.

Today we did some dancing and we did some Maths. We did Lunch Exchange with Venezuela and we did some Monster Exchange. We played outside and we had news and a skeleton listening activity.
By Alex

Today we did our Maths and it was with Mrs N. We did our Mental Maths with Mrs N and we did our Monsters. We did lunch exchange with Venezuela. We did our spelled words with Mrs N. We did our dancing. We played outside.
By Kiara

Today was a SUPER hard day. First, we unpacked our homework folders, then we started our HARD work, Our work was describing our monsters that we drew. My description was 3 pages long! Because we worked so hard, we got to dance to Alvin and the Chipmunks. Then, we went out to play, then came back and did Mental Maths. We wrote what we think we should write on the blog. We did silent reading, then we went home.
By Indi

Two of today's reporters - Alex and Indi

Love from The Smarties

It's the Weekend!

This morning, we had school assembly. Two of The Smarties were called up to the front for very good reasons! Minnesota received an award from Mrs Mt for her fantastic achievements in sports lessons. She has been trying extra hard and doing things she had trouble with before! We're all very proud of you Minn. Noah was called up so he could receive a Student Councilor badge. He is our Year 2 representative for first semester on the school council. Well done Noah! You'll be a great leader.

This afternoon, we completely finished off our monster drawings. They look fantastic and are very detailed. Next week, we'll be working hard on the descriptions, then posting them on our wiki for our Michigan friends to look at.

Our Kentucky Lunch friends asked us a lot of very intriguing questions on our wiki (in the Monday and Tuesday discussion tabs). They asked what verandahs, cheezels, polony, Vegemite and muesli bars are. We didn't realise that they wouldn't know what those things were! We answered their questions and asked some of our own. We also discovered that they don't have spearmint milk, but they have blueberry milk instead! We're not sure if we'd like the taste of that or not!

We were excited today to get some mail, but not on the internet, as usual. We received some postcards from Mrs M, who is away this week. They both had dolphins on the front and one of them had some facts about dolphins on it. It was very interesting. We're looking forward to Mrs M being back next week to teach us.

Next week, we're going to be starting our photo stories about the minibeasts we made this week. We went for a walk around the school, looking for suitable places to take the photos. We have some great ideas already about what we're going to write about.

We're happy it's the weekend because there are some exciting things that some of The Smarties will be doing. Some of us are going camping, or to the movies, or to the logchop, or to our grandparents' houses.

See you all next week!

Love from The Smarties

Hat for Haiti Day

 Hope the wind doesn't change!

Our day was very eventful, with many exciting things happening. Today, we were all allowed to wear any hat we wanted to school, if we brought in a gold-coin donation to help the people of Haiti.Our class raised over $20 which will help buy medicine or school supplies for children. It was fun wearing hats in our classroom!

We were lucky enough to have a Sprint Car come to our school and a man spoke to us about it. He taught us that wearing seatbelts is very important, if we want to stay safe in our cars. He also wanted to tell us that bullying is NEVER allowed in our school. We are all a team and even when we are competitive in sports or games, we need to remember to be kind to each other. We had our photo taken with the car.

We had a MOST exciting afternoon! Mrs N took us to the library so we could use the laptops and we played this really, really, really fun Maths game called Tutpup. It was so much fun. We each had a special log in name and we got to play maths games against children from all over the world! Some of the countries we played against were China, Belgium, The Phillipines, Greece and India. It was interesting seeing the flags of all the different countries and to think about the children sitting in other places in the world, doing Maths with us!

Tia, Caitlin and Kelsi having a brain-break from Tutpup

Mr B helping us out

Our Thinking Hats question today was "What if there were no adults?" We thought of lots of interesting things. Overall, we decided that even though it might be nice to sometimes not have adults around, they're actually pretty useful and we should probably keep them.

We completed our Snow Survey today. We added up all the information we collected from the classes yesterday and made one giant pictograph showing the results for the whole school. We had to cut out a lot of snowmen! We did make it a bit easier though. We decided to make one snowman represent 2 children. We had to cut one snowman in half, to make it mean only one child. If we hadn't done it like that, we probably wouldn't have fitted all our data on one poster!

Tia and Taj with our Snow pictograph

Phew, we're all exhausted!

Love from The Smarties

Snow Survey

We have learned that in some places in the world, it can snow so much that schools are closed. Poor them, missing out on school! We thought it might be interesting to see how many children in our school have been in snow. It never, ever snows where we live, so the only way for anyone to see it is to travel somewhere else far away.

To do our survey, we were going to work in groups and go to one classroom each. But first, we had to work out what we wanted to ask. We had to make sure that we phrased the question just right, so we'd get information that was as accurate as possible. We decided that a good question would be "Have you ever made a snowball with real snow?" We figured that if a kid had been in snow they would definitely have made a snowball! We had to say "real snow" because Mrs N said that when she was little, she used to scrape ice out of the freezer and make snowballs, but that isn't real snow of course!

Once we had our question organised, we needed to work out what we were going to say when we went to each classroom to do our survey. We wrote a script together, as a class, and then one person from each group copied it off the whiteboard so they'd know what to say to the classroom teacher. We had to ask them if it was alright for us to speak to their class. They all said yes.

When we got back to class, we made pictographs with the information we gathered. We used a picture of a snowman to represent each student. We had to do a lot of counting and re-counting to make sure we had just the right amount on our graphs. We found out that all of the class pictographs showed that most children had never seen snow.

Tomorrow, we're going to put all that information together and make a whole school pictograph. It might be hard to fit that many snowmen onto a graph, so we might have to think of a way to not use as many, but still keep our information accurate.

Today is Ash Wednesday, which is the first day of Lent. We went to Mass and we thought of some Lenten promises that we could try to keep between now and Easter.

We were excited to see that our Lunch Exchange friends put up some photos of some of their lunches. It was the very, very end of the day when we saw them, so we didn't get a chance to have a good look, but we will first thing tomorrow!

Love from The Smarties

Terrific Tuesday!

Today, Mrs N read Diary of a Wombat by Jackie French.We liked it a lot. Ms French based the story on a wombat who lives in her garden. Charlee liked the part when the wombat was digging a hole in the garden bed. Kyle thought it was funny when she ate a hole through the door in her search for carrots. Taj liked it when she made lots of noise with a metal rubbish bin to let the humans know that she wanted something to eat. Indi loved it at the end when the wombat decided that "humans are easily trained and made quite good pets!"

After lunch, we did one of our favourite things: we made a mess! It was art-time! This week, we got to use collage materials to make any sort of minibeast we wanted to, using a cardboard tube as a base. Our creations are going to play the starring roles in the photo stories we're going to be making soon. They turned out fantastically well and it was great fun being creative and working out how to attach antennae and legs and other insect parts!

We've almost finished our monster designs for our Monster Exchange. Designing them is the easy part. Next week, we're going to have to write really clear descriptions so that our Michigan friends can re-create them. Some of our designs are very complex and might be difficult to describe. It'll be quite a challenge!

Mrs L was in the classroom helping out this afternoon. We showed her some of the things on our blog and in our wikis. She thought we were very clever.

Mrs N got an email from Ms D, who is the teacher of our Lunch Exchange friends. They weren't at school yesterday as it was President's Day and they might not be at school tomorrow because of snow! Did you know that in some places, when it snows too much, they don't have to go to school! Ms D assured Mrs N that as soon as they get back to school, they'll catch up with their lunch pictures and descriptions. We hope they're having fun in the snow and not getting too cold!

Love from The Smarties

Monday in Year 2

Today we started our first Lunch Exchange project. Jake, Alex, Meg and Kiara wrote detailed descriptions of their lunches and we've put photos of them on our Kentucky Lunch Exchange wiki. We think it's really awesome that we're getting to learn about what children in America like to eat. We think some of their foods will be the same as ours, but some of them will be different. We'll find out when they put descriptions and photos of their lunches on the wiki for us to look at!

Another very exciting project we're working on in the next few weeks, is our Monster Exchange with a school in Detroit, in America. We started it today. We'll be writing more about it soon!

We were very lucky this morning, when Mrs P came into our classroom to talk to us about Aboriginal people. She showed us a really huge map of Australia that showed where all the tribes, or mobs, live. We learned that there are 260 languages that Aborigines speak in Australia. We also learned that they call the land "Mother Earth" because it looks after us and gives us food. It was very interesting and we asked a LOT of great questions.

To help get our brains switched on and our bodies warmed up, we danced to "Shake your Groove Thing" by Alvin and the Chipmunks. We watched and listened to YouTube. It was fun and we want to do it again tomorrow.

To practise our typing, we used paper keyboards! They look just like our real keyboards, except that they're flat and don't actually work. We are going to use them to practise finding letters and punctuation to make our typing faster.

Mrs N is happy to be able to teach us ALL week this week!

Jake and Alex working hard on descriptions of their lunches.

Minnesota, Noah, Tia and Joshua practising their typing.

Love from The Smarties

The Winter Olympics

On the weekend, all of The Smarties took a quick trip to Canada to see the opening of the Winter Olympics. We took some holiday snaps of us playing in the snow while we were there!

Here's Indi, Kelsi, Joshua, Jake and Charlee having a go at ice-skating. They were pretty good for their first time!

 

Kiara, Jack, Minnesota, Meg and Isaac built this fantastic snowman! They look very proud of themselves.

 

Alex, Caitlin, Allia and Kyle were great at sledding. Unfortunately, Taj wasn't very good at holding on, but he didn't seem to mind falling into the snow!

 

Tia, Noah, Catherine and Joel found a Yeti to have their picture taken with. Luckily he was very friendly!

 

Matthew, Raquel, Kate and Ella got a little carried away making snowballs! Fortunately, they're all fast runners and got away safely.

 

Love from The Smarties

Hello from Mrs N

Hi Smarties!

I found some fun sites for you to try out over the weekend, if you want to.

• If you feel like a giggle, here are some jokes to read.
  
• This is a fun game about colours. There is a very fussy frog who only likes to eat certain coloured flies and it's your job to feed him. You have to be good at clicking with your mouse though!
• I think this is one of my favourite games. You need to find 2 numbers that add up to 10 and then click on them, but no other balls can be in the way, so it could be tricky!

I hope you're earning lots of marbles from Mrs M. See you on Monday, for an exciting, action-packed week!

Love from Mrs N

A Day of Firsts

It was a day of "firsts" today. We did our first Oral Language lesson using the Six Thinking Hats. We needed to think about what it would be like if bees were as big as cats. We used the yellow hat, which gets us to think about the strengths, or good things about something. Then we used the black hat, which had us thinking about the bad possibilities of it. It was fun because we got to think of really weird things, like riding bees to school and going inside a beehive to see the bees making honey!

We also learned a new adding-up game using dice and we played it for the first time. We threw a die and wrote down the number that it showed. Then we rolled it again and wrote down the next number and added them together. Some people could even add up to 5 numbers at a time. We are so clever!

We also had our first look at the new blog made by our friends in America. We left them their first comment.

We also had our first ONE THOUSAND hits on our blog! Wow, a lot of people are reading about us!

Love from The Smarties

What if bees were as big as cats?!

Here is what we thought of when we thought about the question "What if bees were as big as cats?" during Thinking Hat Time today.

A Very Busy Day

What a SUPER busy day it was today! We did so much good work.

In Maths, we practised counting in 10s. Jack and Ella have their photo down below, showing their neat and tidy work.We also did Mental Maths in our workbook. Caitlin and Raquel told News today. Caitlin showed us some real crystals that she has and Raquel told us about her family's new boat.

Our grammar lesson today was about capital letters. We learned that we use them when we write names and at the start of sentences. We need to try hard to remember that!

Congratulations to Kate for being our "Uniform Star" for last week. It's great to see all of the Smarties wearing correct uniform every day.

We also have a very exciting project to tell everyone about. We are going to be email-pals with a class in London, England. We looked on the map to see where they live and it's a very, very long way away. We wrote an email to their class to tell them a little bit about us. We are looking forward to reading their replies.

We're all exhausted and we need a nap because we worked so hard today!

Love from the Smarties

Minibeast Nature Art

Make a Smilebox slideshow

Sport and Minibeasts

It was extra fun in Year 2 today. We had sport with Mrs G and we got to practise climbing, balancing, swinging and sliding on the playground obstacle course. Minnesota climbed the blue ladder, which she had never tried to do before. Well done Minn!

This morning, we watched a YouTube video (see below) about interesting and beautiful bugs. Then, we went on a nature walk around the school to collect leaves, twigs, flowers and bark to make minibeast pictures. Mrs N is going to put photos of our artwork up tonight, so come back and check later on!

Mrs N has made a wall for us to post notes about what we'd like to learn about minibeasts. It can be found at http://wallwisher.com/wall/thesmarties  We need to think about it and put an idea there on the weekend.

Love from the Smarties

School is Cool!

Wow, we were all SO excited this morning when we got to school and saw that so many people had been looking at our blog. We even had hits from America, Melbourne and Brisbane! Thankyou very much to the people who left comments for us to read.

Well, today in Year 2 has been another busy, busy day. In daily writing, we had to write a story about something smelly!After recess, we went to our first Library lesson for the year. Mr B showed us how to use browsing sticks to choose a book to borrow. After that, we had singing with the whole school.

Mrs N thinks we've all been very well behaved and we've earned lots of group points. We have 4 marbles in our jar already. When it's full, we get to choose a class reward.

We did some online jigsaw puzzles so that we could practise moving objects around on the Smartboard. It was fun! Some people also started writing in our writing blog. There are photos of Isaac and Kelsi below.

We're looking forward to having Mrs M teaching us tomorrow.

Love from the Smarties.

Our First Day

Today was the first day of school! We are excited to be back to see our friends.

When we got to school we had to use the Smart Board to show something that we did in the holidays. Some of us went swimming, some of us went to the zoo and lots of people went to the movies. After that, we sorted out all our books and pencils and decorated covers for our scrapbooks. We did some spelling and we played the balloon popping game so we could practise reading some sight words.

Mrs N read us a pretend newspaper article that she told us was in the paper today, but she was just tricking us! It was about our first day of school.

Love from The Smarties