Parent Helpers

We were really lucky this morning because we had THREE parent helpers in our classroom! Danica's dad, Elise's mum and Renee's Aunty all came to help us. Instead of our usual reading groups, Mrs N decided to put our helpers to work and gave them each a hands-on group activity to supervise. We split up into groups and tried out each one.

The first activity was to find the letters that spell out our spelling words and then glue them into our scrapbooks. Danica's dad helped us with that. It made a big mess, but it was pretty fun!

The next task was supervised by Renee's aunty and we needed to find pictures of people, places and things for our noun posters. We've been learning all about nouns this week. Nouns are names of people, places or things. Anything we can see, is going to be a noun and if you can put the word "the" or "a" in front of a word, it's probably a noun too. We wrote the nouns on little stickers and stuck them next to each picture we found.

The other activity was painting with watercolour paints. We used watercolours to make our deskmats a few weeks ago, but Mrs N thought we needed to practice using more water on our brushes. Our task today was to paint stripes onto a piece of paper, making sure we used enough water to make the colours light. This will be the background for our current art project. Elise's mum is great at art, so she helped us with our painting.

 

Mrs N didn't get to sit around with her feet up while the parent helpers were hard at work. She had an activity to supervise too!  Elise's mum is very interested in insects, so she brought some in that she found in her garden. They were all dead, which meant that we could get up really close and have a good look at them. We could even touch them, if we were very gentle. Our task in Mrs N's group was to identify the parts of insect bodies and draw them. We discovered that insects have three main body parts - a head, a thorax and an abdomen. They also have eyes, 6 legs, wings, mouth parts for eating and antennae.

 

Thankyou to our parent helpers today (and also to Cathy's mum who came in last week to help). Lots of parent help means we get to do some extra great learning! (Plus, we love showing off how clever we are!)

We received a blog comment from Tanzania yesterday! Tanzania is in Africa and we thought it was pretty cool that people so far away like to read our blog. Their blog is called IST Grade 2 and they mentioned us in one of their blog posts. Mrs N and their teacher, Mr McKillip are going to organise a project for us to do together some time.

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N