Monday, April 30, 2012

Free Rice

Our class has signed up to FreeRice. This is a website where we can practise our Maths and Literacy skills and, at the same time, help feed hungry people around the world! Each time we answer a question correctly, ten grains of rice are donated to the United Nations World Food Programme. We watched this video to help us understand it better.



Love from The Smarties and Mrs G

Thursday, April 26, 2012

Anzac Day

We're now back at school after a great holiday! Mrs G has lots and lots of things planned for us and we're going to be very busy! Later in the term, the Year 4s in our class will be celebrating our First Communion, we're going to be participating in a postcard project, a monster exchange, practising for our assembly and becoming experts on our brand new school iPads. We can't wait!

Yesterday was ANZAC Day. It's a very special day for Australians as it's one of the days we commemorate those who have fought and died in war. It is named after the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) and the date was chosen because it's the anniversary of a very important battle in World War One. The battle was part of the Gallipoli Campaign in Turkey in 1915 and was one of the first for Australian troops. Today, we watched a very informative computer animation about the Gallipoli landing on the ABC website, then we made red poppies to wear and attended the whole school prayer service.


Mrs G was very impressed with us today. She thought she was going to have to spend some time "re-training" us for Daily 5, but she didn't! We all remembered to get straight to work and focus on our tasks for the whole session. She couldn't believe it! What a fantastic class we are.



Love from The Smarties and Mrs G

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Turn off Your TV!

Here's our 5th Smarties TV episode. It's a story about how watching too much television can be bad for our health (unless it's Smarties TV of coutse!). It's much better for us to spend some time outside running around each day, than sitting on the couch! The story is from Time for Kids.


Love from The Smarties and Mrs G

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Penguin on the Waddle


Here's our fourth instalment of Smarties TV! This story is about a penguin in Japan that escaped from the zoo. It's from Time for Kids and is read by Nikolas, Remy and Halle. A special thankyou to Halle, who had to learn an extra section of the reading passage overnight, because Seth was unwell and not at school. Great job Halle!

We're on holidays now and won't be back at school until April 26th. Mrs G will post up the final two episodes of our news programme in the next few days.

Love from The Smarties and Mrs G


Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Green Screening

Recording our news stories has been really fun. We have been working hard on learning our passages and developing our fluency and expression. Some of us were very nervous while we waited for our turn to record! When it was our go, we sat in front of a wall with green cardboard stapled to it. After it was recorded, Mrs G used iMovie to add a photograph in the background to replace the green. It was our first attempt at trying something like this and we're looking forward to making improvements and trying it again with another project next term

Here are the next two episodes of Smarties TV, recorded in class today. The first article we read is a story from Behind the News and is about the St John's First Aid cadets. The second one is from National Geographic for Kids and is about some very old writing!




Love from The Smarties and Mrs G

We're Newsreaders!

For the past few weeks, we've been practising our reading fluency. We each had part of an article to read and today we recorded the first ever Smarties TV broadcast! We brought in clothes from home to make us look like the newsreaders on television and used iMovie to create a video using the greenscreen technique. Mrs G thinks we read beautifully! Here's the first news programme all finished. The story is from National Geographic for Kids. Check back tomorrow for more of our episodes!


Love from The Smarties and Mrs G