Melbourne Cup

Today was Melbourne Cup day. It's a big horse race held in Melbourne on the first Tuesday in November every year. The race is very famous all over Australia and has been held for 150 years! It was shown live on television and the whole school watched it. Our class had a "sweep". This means that everyone picked out the name of one of the horses in the race (without looking) and if their horse came 1st, 2nd or 3rd, they won some Freddo Frogs. Indi, Charlee and Ella were the winners!

The Melbourne Cup is also a day for grown-ups to get dressed-up in fancy clothes. Ladies like to wear pretty, fancy hats. This morning, the girls made hats and the boys made neckties. There was a lot of card and paper for us to choose from, as well as feathers and sequins and other things we could glue on. Don't they look great? We were allowed to wear them all day.

Yesterday, we thought about the things we have been learning during our life. Today, we thought about the gifts we have that help us learn. They are memory, thinking and curiosity.

Memory - Our memory helps us remember how to do things, how things work and what things mean. To test our memory, we studied 15 objects for two minutes, then they were covered up and we went to our desks and wrote down as many as we could remember. Alex and Kiara remembered 10 objects each! It was actually a really tricky thing to do.

Thinking -Thinking means we use our brains to work things out. Our task was to make a horse puppet using a paper bag and some card. Mrs N gave us some instructions, then it was up to us to make them. We had to think about size and shape and what horses look like. We think they're pretty cool.

Curiosity - Being curious means to wonder about things. Wondering about things encourages us to look for answers and learn. We used bubble.us to brainstorm some of the things we wonder about.

We have exciting news! Mrs Mt, our principal, came to our room this morning with a big package. At the end of last term, we entered a competition for World Teacher's Day. We had to draw a picture of a teacher from our school and send it in. The judges loved our drawings and we won a commendation and a big pile of books for our school library! We were very excited and Mrs N and Mrs Mt were very proud of us. If you'd like to see our entries, they're in our Art Week post.

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N