Platypuses

Platypuses have been the theme this week. They are a very unusual looking animal found only on the east coast of Australia. When Europeans first came to Australia, they drew pictures of the platypus and sent them back to England, but the people there thought it was a joke and that there couldn't possibly be an animal that looked like that! But there is and we've learned all about it.

We read a story called The Silver Stream by Robert Roennfeldt. It's about a platypus who lays her eggs in a burrow and cares for and teaches her babies as they grow up. Even though it was fiction, the author knew alot about platypuses and included some real information in his story. We learned a lot. We've also been reading some non-fiction books so that we could learn more facts about platypuses.

We've learned that platypuses:

• cannot breathe underwater, so they need to hold their breath
• have a wide tail to help them steer in the water
• have webbed feet, with claws, to help them swim fast
• have a bill like a ducks which they use to dig in river sand to find food
• are carnivores and eat things like yabbies, snails, larvae and insects
• are a special type of mammal called monotremes (this means they lay eggs but also produce milk for their babies to drink)
• have two types of burrows - one for nesting and one for sleeping
• dig burrows in river banks and block them with leaves and mud to keep predators out
• have poisonous spurs on the feet (male ones only)

We've loved learning about platypuses and were inspired by some of the pictures in the books we've been reading. We created platypus habitat art. We blew bubbles with a straw in some blue paint, mixed with detergent, to create our background. It looks like bubbly water. We glued sand and lentils along the bottom to look like a riverbed and then we glued shredded paper to look like reeds. Finally, we drew platypuses and stuck them onto our underwater habitat.

As well as learning about platypuses, we've also been learning about fiction and non-fiction books. We know that fiction books are stories and non-fiction books are information books. We completed a table to compare them. It's important to know about different types of books, so we can choose the right book for what we want to do.

Miss H, Mrs N's student teacher, has been teaching us about telling the time. She found a fun website where we can practise our skills online! We've also made our very own clocks. We're getting pretty good at it now, so no more excuses for sleeping in on school days!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N