Monday, May 16, 2011

Aussie Animals Galore!

Aussie animals have been the theme in our classroom lately.

Last week, Miss H taught us how to take notes while reading a non-fiction book. We recorded information about koalas while she was reading to us. We then used this information to write reports about them. You can read some of them on our writing blog. In Art, we made cute koala masks from paper plates.


Today, we read Possum Magic by Mem Fox. It's a great story about a baby possum, named Hush, who becomes invisible. Hush and her grandmother travel all around Australia, searching for the cure and they get to eat lots of delicious Australia foods! We each wrote a character analysis and even learned how to draw possums by reading some instructions. We were very clever! We'll be doing more activities about Possum Magic during Literacy block this week.


In Maths, we've been practising subtraction with counters and we've been playing a game in pairs. Each person starts with 20 counters and we take turns to roll a dice. We subtract the number of counters shown on the dice and the winner is the person who subtracts all their counters first. To keep score, we use tally marks to record how many games each of us wins. It's lots of fun!

Another Maths skill we've been learning about is sharing objects among groups. For example, if we were really lucky and we got home from school and our Mum gave us a bag of lollies and asked us to divide them up so everyone in the family had an equal share, we'd need to work out the fairest way to do it.
We discovered three ways of sharing that all work pretty well:
  1. Guess and Try - We could look at the pile of lollies and have a guess about how many each person would probably get, then share them out and see if we need to add or take away from any piles
  2. One by One - We could share them out one by one, a bit like when we deal cards if we're playing a card game.
  3. Count and Divide - We could count the lollies and then divide by the number of groups we need, to work out how many will be in each group.




Our Monday Munchies food today was cucumber. Cucumber is a delicious vegetable that we could have in our sandwiches, in salads, or as a snack on its own. It's crunchy and juicy and delicious! The outside is dark green and a little bit bumpy, while the inside is a lighter green with small, soft seeds. We learned that there are lots of vitamins in the skin of fruit and vegetables and it's good to eat it when we can. Some of us hadn't tried cucumber with the skin, but we all tried it today and most of us liked it. We'll be asking our mums and dads to put some in our lunches!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

1 comment:

  1. There are so many interesting facts in this blog. I love reading it.


    Paige's Granny

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