Aussie Rules Football

In Australia, one of the most popular sports is Australian Rules Football. Sometimes it's called Aussie Rules, AFL, or footy! The AFL season has just started, so we played a new Maths game based on the way scoring is done in the games. Scoring in Aussie Rules is a bit different to most sports. When a goal is scored, the team is awarded six points. If they miss the goal, but kick the ball between the side posts, they are awarded one point and this is called a "behind".

For our Maths game, we got into pairs and had a scorecard and two different coloured dice. First, we needed to decide which dice colour represented goals and which represented behinds. We then rolled the dice and wrote the results on the scorecard. Next, was the tricky bit! We needed to calculate how many points our team got. We needed to use our six times tables and lots of mental addition. We were allowed to use calculators to check our scores, if we needed to. The game was lots of fun and was a great way to be practising some of our maths facts.

Breanna has been very busy at home. She decided that she wanted to draw a map of her house and garden. She made this fantastic "bird's eye view" diagram and brought it in to show the class. She has included a lot of detail and has drawn all the different garden areas very well, even using some symbols to represent various things. Mrs G loves to hear about the independent learning her students do away from school! Great job, Breanna!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs G

All About Plants

We've been learning about plants and watched a Magic Schoolbus video explaining how plants grow and make food. We learned that plants need sun, water and air. If they don't have all of these things in the right amounts, they won't grow very well and may even die. Today, our principal Mr F, helped us plant some seedlings (which are baby plants) in our class vegetable garden. We need to check them each day to make sure there are no insects eating them and we also need to water them, especially on hot days.

For Monday Munchies this week, we tried rockmelon. We learned that they are called cantaloupes in some parts of the world, which we thought was funny. Rockmelons are round, juicy, and bright orange on the inside, with lots of seeds. Their skin is hard and rough and  you don't eat it. Hailey and Ella recorded their thoughts about this week's fruit on a Fotobabble.

We've been very busy taking photos for our photo challenge. We're getting pretty good at thinking of things to photograph and are having fun using Mrs G's iPhone to take the pictures!

Angelina and Ella show Remy their fruit!

Breanna was very creative when she took this picture
of a round opening in the playground.

Jye went to the art room to take this
picture of paper.

A close up of Jared by Nikolas.

Miss V's shoes were photographed
by Ella.

Brock took a picture of our Boggle letters.

 Love from The Smarties and Mrs G

Why we Love Comments

We are really enjoying having our individual blogs to write on. We are having lots of discussions about what makes good posts and good comments, as well as beginning to experiment with adding photographs and changing the text colours and fonts. We especially love receiving comments from the other Smarties, as well as parents and other readers. We made a video today explaining why we love to receive comments and how they make us feel.You can find our individual blogs in the links on the right hand side of this page, so please click on one of them and leave us a comment, or two!

Our photo challenge topics today were "lunch" and "guess where". We're having a lot of fun thinking of possibilities for photos.

Guess where Nikolas is? Kaiden found him and took this great
photo. Doesn't Nik look surprised!

Yum yum, Breanna and Mark show Angela their lunch

Mrs G is away from school until Tuesday, so we'll have to do some catching up with our photo challenge then! Tomorrow, she's going to listen to Alan November talk. He's a world famous expert on using technology in schools and she's very excited about what she will learn (teachers are always learning too!).

Love from The Smarties and Mrs G

Photo Challenge

We're all caught up with our photo challenge. Our topics today were "playground", "hidey hole" and "every day".

This is an interesting photo of Jye on the playground
taken by Mark.

Jai found a great hidey hole and Joel snapped this picture.

Every morning we move our names on the Smartboard to
show we're at school. Laura took this photo.

We were very busy bloggers today! During Daily 5, we had the choice to write a blog post on our individual blogs. Lots of Smarties are posting after school too, which is great! We're going to be learning more about what makes a good blog post and how to write quality comments in the next few weeks. Please visit our blogs (links in the right side bar) and leave us some comments!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs G

Big News!

Mrs G thinks we have a great idea about what blogging is all about, so she's created blogs of our very own at kidblog. We will be using them for some class activities, as well as to write about whatever we want at home. Mrs G is happy, because since we got home from school today, quite a few of us have already added new posts! It seems that we have some very keen writers in our class.

Emily and Adam posting on their own blogs

It's very exciting that we have the chance to write about anything and have the whole world able to read it! However, it's also a big responsibility. We came up with some blogging guidelines that will help us be responsible bloggers and internet users.

• Don't post any personal information, such as last names, the name of our school, or the places we live.
• Always ask permission before we put anyone's photo on the internet.
• Use correct spelling, punctuation and grammar at all times!
• Don't say anything that might hurt somebody's feelings. 
• Be proud of everything we post - we should be happy for everyone we know (including our parents and grandparents) to read anything we write.

You can access our blogs by clicking on the links in the right side bar. Please leave us some comments!

Our photo challenge topics for today were "wet", "art" and "a great smile". Our volunteer photographers today were Maddi, Seth and Adam.

Maddi was the artist of the week for our class last week, so
she photographed her picture on display in the artroom window.

Seth found a wet area outside our classroom where someone
had spilled their water bottle.

Brock has a fantastic smile and Adam photographed it beautifully!

It's Monday which means we had Monday Munchies today! Our healthy food this week was one that nobody had tried before and most of us had never even seen it before. We tried kiwiberries. They're about the size of a cherry tomato and have smooth, dark green skin. They felt a little squishy and juicy. When we cut them open, they looked exactly like Kiwifruit! That's because they're another species, which are smaller and without furry skin. We thought they tasted almost the same as Kiwifruit, but a little bit like a fresh fig too.

Love from The Smarties and Mrs G

Our New Learning Tools

We have some new tools for learning in our classroom. They're called Hot Dots. We have sets of flashcards and some special electronic pens. We look at the Maths problem on a card then press the special pen onto the dot next to the number we think is the answer. If we're right, a green light appears and if we were wrong, it glows red. It's a fun way to practise our basic maths facts and we're looking forward to using them in our Maths rotations.

The topics for the photo challenge today were "in my school bag", "bus stop" and "teachers". We learned about the importance of getting permission before we take someone's picture and put it on the internet. Some people don't want their picture online and they should always be given the choice (and it's also good manners to ask before you take a photo of someone).

This is a picture Ryan took of what was inside his schoolbag
today. It was just his hat and lunchbox!

We don't have any official bus stops near our school, so Emily
took a picture of where the school buses park in the afternoon.

The lovely Mrs M and Miss F are teachers at our school and they
happily posed for Alexia to take this photo.

Love from The Smarties and Mrs G

Photo Challenge

The photo challenge is helping us practise our photography skills. We have to be really careful to keep the camera steady when we press the button (which is called a shutter), otherwise our photos will be blurry. Today's photo challenge categories were library, lunchtime and a mess.

Laura, Jared and Kaiden were photographed by Angelina
choosing books in the library.

Alexia, Halle and Emily are enjoying their food at lunchtime.
The photo was taken by Kya.

Ryleigh had no trouble finding a mess to photograph
at swimming lessons today!

Mrs G started blogging two years ago and her very first blogging students are now in Year 4. Their teacher is a good friend of Mrs G and they have a blog called Blogbusters. We're hoping to do some projects and perhaps Skype with them during the year! Many of us will end up at the same high school in a few years time and it would be fun to get to know each other before then!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs G

10,000 Hits

After checking our hit counter on Friday, we predicted that we would reach 10,000 hits over the long weekend and we were right! We were happy to see that we have had 10,004 visitors to our blog since the start of this year. It's exciting to know that we have shared our learning with so many people!

We've decided to participate in a photo challenge. We saw that 3H at Merewether Heights Primary School had organised a challenge, but we didn't see it in time to begin when they did. We started it today and we'll take two, or three photos each day this week to catch up! It will be a good way to practise our photography skills with our class camera. Each day, there is a word or phrase and we are going to take it in turns to think of a way we can take a photo of something representing those ideas. Today, we did respect, noisy and being physical.

We are showing respect for our classroom resources by putting them
away where they belong. This photograph was taken by Hailey.

Angelina and Jared seem to be enjoying banging on the desk
and being noisy. Chelsey took this picture.

Kaiden and Laura are being physical on the playground.
This photo was taken by Jai.

We tried something new today. We did "running dictation" and it was really fun, but very challenging! We got into pairs and one of us was the writer and one of us was the runner. The runner had a piece of paper with two or three sentences written on it and they were about ten metres away from their partner. It was the runner's job to carefully read the sentences, put their paper down, then run to their partner and tell them what was written on the paper. The writer then needed to write it down. The runner could go back to check the paper as often as they liked. It sounds pretty easy, right? WRONG!

We discovered that clear communication was really, really important! The runner had to clearly dictate the words and the writer had to listen very carefully. Lots of team work was required to make sure that the finished sentences were exactly the same as the ones Mrs G gave us. Our spelling and punctuation needed to be absolutely perfect and we had to make sure that we didn't leave any words out, or add extra ones in. Not only was it a great exercise in communication, but it also showed us the importance of proof-reading and editing our writing until it is perfect. It's going to be a regular activity in our class and we'll be challenging ourselves to get better and better at it!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs G

Remy's Story

Remy likes to write stories. Today, she wrote one and we published it on StoryBird. It's a great story Remy!

Grumblethe Goblin by Smarties on Storybird

Love from The Smarties and Mrs G

Swimming Lessons

This week and next week, our whole class is doing swimming lessons. It's really important for children living in Australia to learn how to swim because we have lots of beaches and swimming pools. We're all really good swimmers. Check out the photos in the Animoto video to see us in action!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs G