An Action-Packed Day!

Jenaya, Mitchell and Makayla using the reading phones

Well it's now the fourth week of school and we're really in the swing of things. Mrs N has listened to us all reading and worked out what we need to learn and practice. We have reading groups called Lions, Tigers, Pandas and Unicorns and we each spend time with Mrs N during the literacy block. She helps us learn new words, improve our fluency (how smoothly we read) and teaches us ways we can work out words we don't know. While she's working with one of the groups, all the other groups are practising their reading on their own. We do things like independent reading, reading with a friend and reading the words that are all around our classroom. Being good readers helps us with all the other subjects we do at school, even Maths!

Jacinta, Renee & Jayden with their writing

One of the Smarties is in hospital for the next two weeks. Paige has cystic fibrosis, so she needs to go and have treatment sometimes. We missed her at school today, but she emailed us, which was very exciting! She told us about how she needs to have needles and  physiotherapy. She doesn't like those things, but she loves the delicious food, the arts and crafts and being able to lay around in bed! She thinks it's pretty fun to stay in hospital.

We decided to write back to Paige, so we got into groups of three and shared the job of writing. We each had a different coloured texta and took turns to write the words. We needed to work together to decide what we wanted our sentences and questions to say, then we wrote them out, helping each other with spelling and with remembering capital letters, fullstops and question marks. Mrs N has typed up all of our letters and emailed them to Paige to read. Hopefully, it'll make her happy!

Mrs N loves the story of The Gingerbread Man! We read it online today and thought it was great! We're going to be doing some more activities about the story in the next few weeks. Today, after we read it, we were each given a picture of a gingerbread man. Mrs N then read out some instructions and we needed to listen very carefully and do what she asked. There were things like "If you're a girl, colour his buttons pink, but if you're a boy, colour his buttons blue". Everyone's gingerbread man turned out differently!

After doing so much already today, it was finally time for Monday Munchies! Our healthy food this week was rockmelon. We learned that rockmelon:

• is called canteloupe in some places
• was originally grown in Italy
• has a hard, rough skin that you don't eat
• has lots of seeds inside that you don't eat
• is a great source of vitamins A and C
• is very juicy!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N