The Last Day of Term

Today is the last day of Term 1. We're starting two weeks holidays, yay! It's a tradition at our school to have a gigantic Easter raffle on the last day of school before Easter. We had it this afternoon and there were 64 prizes!

This morning, our school held an ANZAC Day service. It's usually commemorated on April 25th, but we'll be on holidays, so we did it today. ANZAC stands for "Australian and New Zealand Army Corps". It's a day where we remember the Australians and New Zealanders who have died in wartime. Some representives from the local Returned and Services League visited our school and Chief Petty Officer Aaron came to our classroom to talk to us. He showed us his medals and talked about what it's like living on a ship in the navy. Here are some of the things we learned:

• his ship is an ANZAC class frigate and it's 118 metres long
• sometimes they can go fishing from the boat
• he has a lot of badges on his uniform and some of them show what his job and rank are
• he has some medals for helping in Iraq and Afghanistan
• the army, navy and airforce have different uniforms
• he has to share a room with 14 other people on the ship
• pirates stay away from the ship because they're scared
• the bullets from the gun on the ship weigh 20 kilograms
• he had to sit some exams to be promoted
• some people keep photos of their families inside their hats
• it's noisy down below when it's rough and sometimes it's hard to sleep when the water crashes against the side of the ship
• everyone on the ship has a special job and Aaron's job is working with radars
• he gets sea sick and sometimes has to go outside for some fresh air
• he's never seen a shark but he's seen snakes, turtles, dolphins, whales and jellyfish

For Monday Munchies yesterday, our healthy food was pepitas, or pumpkin seeds. They were small and green and yummy. Some of us thought they smelled like bird or guinea pig food, which is true, because birds and guinea pigs like to eat them too! It's a super-healthy people food and is nice sprinkled on salads.

We've been doing lots of Easter arts and crafts (as well as some Mother's Day activities which need to remain secret for now!). We really love using oil pastels and water colours.

  

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Delicious Blueberries

For Monday Munchies yesterday we tasted blueberries and they were great! We liked that they were juicy and sweet. They were dark purple in colour, but we thought that "blueberries" was a good name for them.

Delicious blueberries

Mother's Day is on May 8th. Even though that's still almost 4 weeks away, we've started to get organised for it, because we start school holidays next week. Today, we made special invitations for a Mother's Day afternoon tea that our class is having on May 6th. Mrs N taught us how to draw cupcakes and teacups and we put them on our invitations. They look amazing! We made invitations for our mums and our grandmothers.

Cathy with her afternoon tea invitations

We're making our mums something special for Mother's Day, but we can't tell you what it is yet! We don't want to spoil the surprise. To make it, we had to count out fifty little plastic shapes. We discussed the different ways we could do this and decided that making 5 groups of 10, or 10 groups of 5 would work very well. We wouldn't lose track of our counting and it would be easy for us to check how many we had already counted. Knowing about Maths is really useful sometimes!

5 groups of 10 is 50

10 groups of 5 is 50

 Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Danica's New Glasses

Danica was away from school yesterday because she was picking up her gorgeous new glasses. She's pretty excited about them and is being very responsible about taking care of them and keeping them clean.

Over the last two days, we've been learning all about vowels. We know that the vowels are a, e, i, o and u but they make different sounds, depending on the words they're in and they can be either long or short. An easy way to work out if the sound is long is to see if you can hear the name of the vowel in the word. If you can, then it's a long vowel sound!

We did some free choice writing this morning and we wrote about some really interesting things. Be sure to check out our writing blog to read some of them!

We've been lucky to have lots of parent help lately. Thankyou to Jacinta, Tieg, Elise and Tatiana's mums, as well as Renee's dad. Lots of parent help means we can do lots of interesting things and we love showing them what we can do!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Beautiful Bunnies

We really impressed Mrs N in art this week. She learned how to draw a rabbit and then taught us. They turned out so well! We thought the legs were the trickiest part, but we kept trying. After outlining our beautiful bunnies with black markers, we ruled lines in the background, then painted it all with watercolours. We are super-duper at using just the right amount of water on our brushes now.

To go with our bunny art, we also wrote palindrome poetry about Easter. A palindrome is something that can be read both backwards and forwards. Words like "madam", "Hannah" and "racecar" are all examples of palindromes. That was too easy for us though! We decided to write poems that could be read both forwards and backwards. You can read some of them on our class writing blog.

 

 

Spelling can be tricky. There are many sounds in the English language that can be spelled in different ways. Today, we looked at the /ch/ sound and discovered that it can be written in two main ways - "ch" and "tch". After brainstorming lots of words with the /ch/ sound, we discovered that we couldn't think of any that began with "tch". Mrs N couldn't think of any either! All the words we came up with used "tch" in the middle or at the end of the word. However, there were many, many words that begin with the "ch" spelling. We decided that when we need to spell a word starting with /ch/ it's probably going to be spelled with a "ch".

For Monday Munchies yesterday, we tried Carambola. It's sometimes called starfruit because when you slice it, it looks like a five-pointed star. We thought it was pretty delicious. Three people didn't really like it, but everyone else wanted seconds!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

A Day of Dancing

This morning, our class had our assembly in front of the whole school. We sang and danced to a song called Gotta Keep Reading and we were fantastic! Many of the teachers told Mrs N how impressed they were that we learned all the words so well and that we sang loud enough for everyone to hear us. It was really great!

We also revealed our version of The Gingerbread Man. In our version, The Gingerbread Man met some of our teachers and avoided being eaten!

This evening, our school had a disco. Mrs N went along to have a dance with us and she took some photos. Our school is awesome and we're lucky to have so many friends to share the fun with!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N