Hot Cross Buns

We had a day FULL of Hot Cross Buns!

We learned that Hot Cross Buns are a traditional food that we eat at Easter. They are spiced buns with a cross on the top, which represents the cross of Jesus.

This morning, we had a taste test. We tried Hot Cross Buns with fruit, some with choc chips and some with nothing in them. We needed to decide which one we liked the best. We made a class pictograph to record our results. We discovered that Hot Cross Buns with chocolate chips were the Smarties' favourites, but we all liked all of the types we tried.

Catherine and Isaac

Raquel

Tia and Joshua

Kelsi and Ella with our pictograph

Mrs N taught us a new song. It's called "Hot Cross Buns" which is a very old song from England. It was fun to sing. We recorded it so you can hear us singing.

We hope you liked it!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Hello Smarties

Teddy Gram Note Generator

A Visit from the Eagles

The Smarties with Brad from the West Coast Eagles

Our school was very lucky today. We had some special visitors. Brad, from the West Coast Eagles Football Club came to talk to us about lots of very important things. We learned a LOT.

He spoke to us about the benefits of playing sport. When we play sport, we get the "Three Fs". They are:

FUN     FITNESS    FRIENDS

He also told us about the "Five Rs". These are things that we should try to do so that we can grow up to be the best we can be. They are:
RESPECT OURSELVES - We need to respect our bodies by taking care of them.

RESPECT OTHER PEOPLE - We need to respect the ideas and opinions of the people around us. as well as being good sports.

RESPECT THE ENVIRONMENT - We need to look after our school, our town, our country and the Earth.

REACH OUR POTENTIAL - We should always do our best and make the most of the special talents we have.

REACH OUT TO THE COMMUNITY - Doing good things for other people in our community is very important.

Brad had a friend with him! He was a very big surprise. His name was Rick "The Rock" Eagle. He was funny and silly. He made us laugh a lot. Brad checked Rick's lunchbox and saw that he had some very healthy foods inside it, but there were some things that are not so good for him. We talked about the importance of eating healthy, natural foods and drinking lots of water because they are the best things for our bodies. 

Our activity in class this afternoon was to think about the things that are in a healthy lunchbox. We decided there should be some fruit, vegetables, grainy bread, some cheese or yogurt, lean meat and a water bottle. We made some pictures to show what we'd like in our healthy lunchbox.

For those of you who aren't Australian, you might be wondering who the "West Coast Eagles" are. They are an Australian Rules Football team from Western Australia. Many of The Smarties barrack for them!  If you're not Australian, then you might not know about Australian Rules Football (also called AFL). It's one of the most popular sports here and many children play it (but with modified rules because the grown-up version can be very rough!). It's nothing like soccer and not much like American Football. Here's a YouTube video we found to give you an idea!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

We Ate GoldfishToday!

No, don't worry. They weren't the goldfish that swim around in ponds. They were Goldfish crackers that were sent to us by our Kentucky Lunch friends. We received our much anticipated parcel from them this morning and we were beside ourselves with excitement! Inside, was a card, signed by all their class, a book called The Giant Jam Sandwich, as well as two packets of cheese flavoured Goldfish. We all tried them and thought they were delicious! There were even enough for us to take a few home to share with our mums and dads.

We decided to use Daily Writing time to write our thoughts about Goldfish and our other presents. We also made Tux Paint pictures about them. If you go to our Class Publishing Wiki, you'll see some of our finished products and you'll hear us reading out some of our writing. We didn't get time to record them all today, but they should be done tomorrow.

Alex, Kelsi and Raquel with our presents

Meg and Jack looking very happy!

We have a new display in our classroom. On our world map, we've labeled the countries we're doing activities with. We really love learning about the children in other places in the world!

We've finished all of our Monster Exchange drawings and they should be put up on our wiki by next week. We can't wait to compare our pictures!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Open Night

Tonight was Open Night at school. Our parents had a chance to come into our classroom and have a look at all the great work we've been doing. We had some laptops set up so we could show them how fantastic we are at navigating around our blog and all the links. They also got to look at our books and at the work displayed on the walls. We think they liked it!


This morning, we had a nice surprise. Our Kentucky friends had made a Photo Story about our Lunch Project. It was really great to hear their voices and to listen to all they things they learned about us. If you'd like to see it, you can find it here.

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

We are Techno Geniuses!

Mrs N is SO pleased with us! We had the laptops in our classroom ALL day today and we really impressed her with some of our skills!

In the morning, we used this really great site which let us design our own mask and then print it out. We needed to choose 5 animals from the list and it made a mask picture using some of the physical characteristics of those animals. We printed them, coloured them in and wrote descriptions. We needed to type the URL in all by ourselves, which we all did a fantastic job of! We learned that if there are capital letters in a web address, then we need to make sure we do capital letters when we type it in too. Thanks to Jack's mum who came in to help us while we were doing these. Here are the finished products.
We  also played Tutpup, which we LOVE and we're fantastic at navigating to the right address, logging ourselves in and choosing the right games to play. We are almost completely independent at doing this now. It is fabulous Mental Maths practice.

Our final activity was using software called Tux Paint. It's a painting programme and we had to draw a picture of ourselves. We had some time to play around and explore all the neat things we could do with it. There are all sorts of pictures and special effects we could use. Mrs N is extremely impressed with our touchpad skills. She is amazed by some of the pictures we created because she was expecting it to be very hard for us to draw without using a mouse, but we proved her wrong! All our pictures are posted on our Class Wiki, if you want to see, but here are a couple of examples.

Jake

Catherine

Here we are, being busy techno-bees.


We have two new projects happening in our classroom. The first one is a wiki about Easter Traditions. We've asked some other classes from around the world about the things they do at Easter time and they're going to put in on our wiki. So far, we have classes in Canada, India, Russia, Thailand, America, Poland and the Ukraine participating and Mrs N has asked some more too. We'll be putting up information about  Easter in Australia as well.

Our other project is for Earth Day. We want to find out what other classes are doing to help the environment, so we've made another wiki for them to share with us.

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

A Message for Classes who Read our Blog

Earth Day is coming up soon! We're celebrating it on April 22nd. The Smarties were wondering if there are any classes who read this blog, who would like to participate in a small Earth Day project.

We want you to share with us what you're doing to mark the occasion. Maybe you will be:

• cleaning up the school or area around it
• doing craft with recycled materials
• organising a recycling project at your school
• turning off the lights and power for the day
• educating the school community about an environmental issue
• organising a toy or book swap at school, or
• planting some trees or native plants

Whatever you're going to do, we'd love to hear about it.

Teachers can contact Mrs N (email details in the sidebar) and she'll add you to our Earth Day wiki, so you can put your activities there. Wouldn't it be interesting to see what other children around the world are doing to help look after the Earth that we all share?

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

What a Wacky Day!

Coloured hair, curly hair, hair in pigtails with ribbons, hair spiked with gel, wigs, clips, glitter and hair spray. It was Wacky Hair Day at school today. We were raising money for the Cancer Foundation. It was great fun. Even Mrs M had butterfly clips and fairy dust in her hair!

The Year 7's did their Assembly today. It was about fairytales but they got it all wrong... they mixed up The Three Little Pigs with Little Red Riding Hood and Goldilocks gets eaten by Baby Bear. It was really funny. We liked their poems very much. Here is Kyle's recount of it.

The Year 7 Assembly was about the Three Little  Pigs and Red Riding Hood. Little Red Riding Hood shot the wolf. The Little Pig in the brick house had called her. The Little Pig thought Red Riding Hood had saved him but then she shot him too and used his skin for a suitcase.
Yr 7 had mixed up the fairytale. Mrs M called it a fractured tale. Yr 7 also mixed up the Three Bears because Goldilocks stole some porridge, broke an antique chair and when she went upstairs she chose the most comfortable bed to sleep in but she kept her shoes on, that had mud all over them.
At the end, Goldilocks got in trouble with the Bears and Baby Bear ate her!
I like the Yr 7 Assembly because it was funny and they had put a lot of effort into it.
By Kyle

At Assembly we asked the rest of the school to help us collect 150 old mobile phones for our Mobile Phone Muster. We showed them an animation we had made in class that helped explain about the muster. Each class has a bucket for collecting the phones.

Mrs Mc came in for Parent Help. She was very helpful, especially at filling in our Have-A-Go Pads. Thank you Mrs Mc.

Can you hear that sound?...Two more marbles in our class reward jar because we won the Good Manners Award! Mrs M and Mrs N are very proud of us. When we fill the jar with marbles the whole class celebrates with a special activity. We can't wait.

Talking about a special activity, Mrs M taught us how to play the Bean Bag Boogie (passing a bean bag to a partner in time to the music). It was great fun. We had to concentrate very hard so that we wouldn't mix up our left and right hands. It was especially good fun when the music got faster and we had to try and keep up.

In Religion we learnt about Saint Thomas More. He wrote a book about believing in God. He was a very good writer.

Love from The Smarties and Mrs M

Wacky Hair Day

Today is Wacky Hair Day. We were allowed to come to school with coloured, crazy, messy, weird, wacky hair. We're doing it to raise money for cancer research. Each child was asked to bring in a gold coin donation (which is $1 or $2), if they wanted to have crazy hair. Here are The Smarties!

 Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Assembly Presentation

Today, we made an Xtranormal animation to show the school at assembly tomorrow.



Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Mobile Muster

When we got to school this morning, we found this message on our blog!



This is the video the koala (who we think sounds suspiciously like Mrs N!) wanted us to watch so we could learn how phones are recycled:


In Daily Writing, we wrote about why we should recycle phones. Here are some of our ideas.

We should not throw old phones in the bin because the chemicals leak into the soil. We should put phones in phone recycling bins.
By Joel

Putting your mobiles in the bin is wrong, because they can leak. The mobiles can make gold and silver. 90% of mobile phones can be recycled. The mobiles can make railway sleepers.
By Kiara

You can make gold. You can make railway sleepers. You can recycle phones. Don't throw mobile phones in the bin.
By Matthew

Do not put your mobile phone in the bin. Mobile phones can be made into gold and silver.
By Catherine

Recycle mobile phones because they make jewelery and silver and fence posts. If you don't recycle phones, the chemicals leak into the soil.
By Noah

We made posters to put up all around the school, asking everyone to bring in any unused mobile phones they have at home. The reasons we want to recycle them are:

• 90% of each mobile phone can be recycled into something new.
• If we recycle, we reduce the space that rubbish takes up at the tip.
• If we can re-use the metals in old phones, then we don't have to mine as much from the Earth.
• We don't want the chemicals in mobile phones to leak into the environment.

Tomorrow, at school assembly, we're going to be telling the school all about our recycling project. Our goal is to collect 150 phones. We think we can do it!

Also today, we made a Voice Thread about our Kentucky Lunch Exchange. We wrote out something we learned, something we liked and something we found interesting and then read them out.


Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Daily Writing

Here is some of today's Daily Writing. The topic was "Pancakes."

First you get the self raising flour , put the egg in the self raising flour then you put the milk in. Mix it around  with electric beaters and if it gets thick put some more milk in. Get an electric  pan out then put the pancakes in it. Wait 1 minute then flip them over for another 1 minute. Once they are cooked you can put whatever you want on it. For example I would  put golden sryup on it. 
By Kyle 

I like cooking pancakes because we all like them. We wrote it in the family cook book. That is a book with all our favourite recipes in it. I wish I could cook pancakes for Mum, Dad and Mia to eat in bed but I'm not old enough to use the mix master or the pan. Granny makes really yummy pancakes. She never lets us not have them. She makes them once a week. 
By Indi

There was a boy who wanted  to make cookies and pancakes but he could not make them. So he had his mum and dad make them.
By Noah

Love from The Smarties and Mrs M

The Smarties are Photographers!

We were very lucky to have two mums helping in our classroom this morning. Minn and Alex's mums were a very big help to Mrs N. They took us, one at a time, around the school to take our photos for our Minibeast Photo Stories. We felt very responsible to be able to use the cameras on our own. Mrs N said the pictures have turned out great so far! Here's one that Kate took. It's a good photo because it's clear and not fuzzy at all, which means she kept the camera very still, and her minibeast is the main object in the picture.

At singing, we sang lots of fun songs, including "If I were a Butterfly". In Library, Mr B read us a book called Over the Hill and Around the Bend with Granny and Bert (and me). We really liked it.

Also today, Mrs N gave out the monster descriptions that our American Monster Exchange friends have written. We began thinking about what the monsters they've described would look like. It was hard work reading all that writing and we learned some new words like the colours "peach", "scarlet", and the word "popsicle". Most of us have started a practice drawing of the monster. When we're pretty sure we know how it's supposed to look, we'll do good copies, ready for putting onto our wiki next week. It's very exciting!

Mrs N has organised the package that we're sending to our Kentucky Lunch Exchange friends. She's going to post it tomorrow. We've all made cards and signed the Possum Magic book we're sending them. There are also some Caramello Koalas (which might be a little melted already!) and some K-Time Twist bars, because they didn't know what they were and they were hard for us to describe.

It was a busy day!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Language of Position

Today, we did a lot of work learning about the language of position. This means words like "above," "on," and "next to." We made a Photo Story of what we learned. We took all of the photos on our own!

Mr F, who is one of Mrs N's teacher friends from America, sent her some Gummy Worms for us to try. These are a little bit like the snake lollies we have here in Australia. We had a vote and 6 out of 22 of us liked Snakes, but the rest of us wish we could buy Gummy Worms here because they like them better! Here is a Wordle, showing some of the words we thought of to describe them.

Our daily writing topic was free choice writing today. Here are some of our stories.

On Saturday, I went to cricket with Ella and Mitchell. It was very fun! I also climbed a tree.
By Catherine

Today, I played Star Wars and I finished off all the levels. I got Darth Vader.
By Isaac

My Aunty Amanda and Sara and Mum are going to the ACDC concert. Me and Kali are going to Nana and Pa's.
By Matthew

Once there was a magical flower. It was beautiful and it got bigger and bigger until it was ginormous!
By Allia

Yesterday, I went to a Tupperware party. I got a prize that had a flip lid and I got 3 prizes. We had a really nice drink and they also had mango slushies and my baby cousin had a mango drink and the little kids had a mango drink.
By Charlee

On Friday,  I went to a wedding and it was disgusting when they kissed. After the wedding, I went to the Ziegelaar's and we played the Yes and No Game and we played Buzz. We stayed up very, very late and we got picked up very, very late.
By Kate
Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Clean Up Australia!

We love our school. We love it so much that we spent the afternoon cleaning it up! This Sunday is "Clean Up Australia Day." As we're not at school on the weekend, we did our part today, cleaning up our school grounds, with the help of Mrs G and the Year 6s. We were surprised at how much rubbish we found, because our school doesn't look messy! A lot of it was hidden under bushes and behind things. Most of it was paper and plastic, but there was also some glass from broken bottles, which we got Mrs N to pick up for us. While a lot of what we picked up wasn't put there by us, we all still need to make more of an effort to make sure all our paper and plastic from our lunches goes straight in the bin and doesn't blow out again!


Earlier in the day, we had a good look at all the information that our Kentucky friends shared with us about lunches. We made a Venn diagram to show what we learned about the similarities and differences between the foods we eat, and where we eat them. We really did learn a lot! We also made our new friends "thankyou" cards and we're going to be sending them a book called Possum Magic, which is a story all about Australian foods and our capital cities (but sshh, don't tell them!). Our package will also contain a jar of Vegemite. We wonder if they're going to like it. We can't wait to hear what they think!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Wonderful Wednesday!

Ciao! In Italian today Senora told us about the Italian puppet play that's coming to our school next week. It's called 'Puss In Boots'. It sounds really good. Mrs L added movements to our music story in class Music today. It was fun when we had to try and copy what she did!

In Mental Maths we learnt that a numeral is a number and, in Handwriting, we practised our downward strokes using uppercase and lowercase 'i'. Mrs M says we are getting better at remembering to put spaces between our words.

Some of the class went to choir with Mrs L. Then after lunch we had Mrs M's mum and dad come to visit us. They live in Narrogin, WA.

Today's Daily Writing topic was "Describe a small animal." We decided to write them like "Who am I?" riddles. Here is some of our work.

I have two fins on each side.
I have one gill on each side.
I have one tail.
What am I?
(I'm a fish!)
By Matthew

I have fluffy ears.
I have four legs.
I have a little tail.
I am different colours.
What am I?
(I'm a puppy!)
By Caitlin

I have two pointy ears.
I have a long, furry tail.
I have three whiskers on each side.
I have paws.
What am I?
(I'm a cat!)
By Ella


Love from the Smarties and Mrs M.

3000 Hits!

We're very proud of our 3000 hits!

There was such excitement in our room today when we got back from lunch and looked at our blog and realised that we have had THREE THOUSAND hits! This is amazing as it's been just four weeks since we started our blog! We're very happy that people like to read about us :)

To celebrate this milestone, we did some special activities this afternoon. We took a total of 3000 steps. We used calculators to work out how many we would have to take each, for it to total 3000. There are 22 Smarties at school today, plus Mrs N, which meant we had to take 130 steps each and then Jack and Meg took 5 extra steps each to make it up to 3000.

Tia, a very surprised looking Joshua and Jack doing some calculating.

The Smarties taking their 3000 steps. Our poor grass doesn't like the hot weather we've had!

We also did a fun group collage activity. We decorated the numbers 3, 0, 0 and another 0 to make 3000! We think they look fantastic. We demonstrated a lot of skills like teamwork, sharing materials, encouraging each other and sharing ideas. It was also great fun!

Kate, Kelsi and Indi working hard on their zero collage.

Earlier in the day, our daily writing topic was "An Alien at School". Here are some of our stories.

An alien came to school and everyone screamed and Mrs N screamed and the alien had lots of heads and I said "There is an alien!"
By Charlee

Once there was an alien at school. It wrecked the school. He tipped the bins over and the alien ate a banana and he fell over, then he went away.
By Taj

"Ahhhh!" I said. There's an alien at school and everyone ran to safety. "Run, run, ahhhh, ahhhh!" We don't like it when the aliens attack. "Run!"
By Raquel

If there was a giant alien in our school, everyone would scream and run away because they would be terrified.
By Allia

There was an alien at school and nobody liked it because he blew up things. He blew up towers and castles and people. He was mean. He actually liked people, but they didn't like him.
By Isaac

We're happy to report that our Kindness page has some entries already! We were on the lookout all day for people doing kind things.

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Random Acts of Kindness

 

Being kind to our classmates and the people in our school is very important. To celebrate the kind and caring things we do, The Smarties have started a new wiki page called "Random Acts of Kindness". You'll find it here. There is also a link to it in the sidebar.

When we do kind things, it is best to do them without expecting to be thanked or praised, but it's also nice for people to say "thankyou". Our new Kindness page is where we can do this. If someone does something nice for us, we can write their name and what they did as a way of giving them some recognition. We are already very good at being kind and caring, so our page should be filled up very soon!

Love Mrs N