Saturday Footy

The boys in our class LOVE to play footy! Many of them are in teams that play on weekends. This morning, Mrs G went to watch one of the teams play and was very impressed with their skills! She saw lots of marking, kicking, handballing and running, as well as some great sportsmanship. Great job Ryan, Kaiden, Joel, Jye and Adam!

We have an assembly coming up later this term. Our theme is going to be "Reading" and we'll be singing two songs about books. We have started creating some art to be displayed behind us while we're singing and dancing. We painted self portraits, then chose one of our favourite books. Mrs G photocopied the covers and we glued them to our portraits with cut-outs of our hands to make it look like we were holding the books. We think they look really cool! We really do love reading in our class, especially during Daily 5 time, when we get to make choices about what we read and where we read it.

 

 Love from Mrs G

The Very Cranky Bear

This morning, all of our Pre-Primary to Year 4 students gathered in the library to participate in National Simultaneous Story Time. We listened to the story through the interactive iPad app, projected onto the Smartboard. It was a really funny story about a very cranky bear and how some other animals made him less cranky.

We did some more work on fractions today. This time we used chocolate! We were each given a little box of Smarties, which we had to count. This number would be the denominator.We sorted our Smarties into colours, then recorded each fraction on our sheet. We needed to write it in numbers and in words. For example, if we had 4 pink Smarties in a box that had a total of 12 in it, we would write it as 4/12, which is four twelfths. It was a very delicious Maths task!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs G

We Got Mail!

It was a very exciting morning for the Smarties today. When Mark went to the office to deliver something, Mrs D gave him something that came in the mail for us. It was our very first postcard and it was from Russia! It was in a beautiful envelope with some really cool stamps and pictures.

Our mail from Russia

Today, I had to take an iPad to the office for Mr F. When I left I got the postcard from Russia. When I got back to the classroom, I said out loud, "We got a postcard from Russia!" We are going to put it on the board of postcards. Mrs G let us pass it around. When everyone had a look, we went on the blog. We saw them learning English doing "Little Cow". Then, Mrs G showed us how they write in Russia.


By Mark


In Monday Munchies this week, we tasted raw mushrooms. Some of us have tried cooked mushrooms before, but not many of us have had them uncooked. Some people like to eat them in salads, or just as a snack. We were very surprised to learn that mushrooms are not plants. They are actually a fungus. We thought that all fungi (the plural of fungus) were green, yucky and inedible!

We have started learning about fractions. We know that fractions are equal parts of a whole. We created some delicious looking fraction sundaes to help us understand. What a shame we couldn't make real sundaes! We chose how many scoops of each flavour we wanted, then wrote it in fractions. We thought it was pretty easy because it was just like when Mrs G marks our spelling tests. We get a score out of 15 and it's written as a fraction.

Love from The Smarties and Mrs G

New Bloggers

Mrs G is helping some Year 5, 6 and 7 boys with blogging. They meet every Thursday afternoon to learn something new. Yesterday, they made their very first posts. Please check them out and perhaps leave them an encouraging comment. Next term, our class will be allowed to join the after-school blogging club too!

Bayley's Blog

Matthew's Blog

Lincoln's Blog

Love from The Smarties and Mrs G

Avocado

For Monday Munchies today (we didn't get time yesterday!), we tried avocado. Many of us were very nervous about trying it because we were sure we wouldn't like it. However, once we'd had a taste, we decided it was actually quite delicious! Mrs G even overheard a couple of students talking about asking their mums to put it in their sandwiches tomorrow.

When we opened the avocado, we discovered a huge seed inside. It is brown and smooth and quite heavy. We looked online and found some instructions for growing an avocado tree from seed, so we decided to try it. We plan to eventually add it to our vegetable garden.

Love from The Smarties and Mrs G

Quad Blogging

Our class is quad blogging with three classes from the United Kingdom. This means that each week for the next four weeks, one of our blogs will be the focus and we'll read it and leave comments.

The other classes we're blogging with are:

  

Tetherdown Primary School

Cleopas Primary School

Mereside Primary School

This week, it's our week, so here's a little bit about us!

• We are a class of 26 Year 3 and 4 students.
• We have 5 Year Threes and 21 Year Fours.
• We live in Western Australia.
• Our teacher is Mrs G.
• The boys in our class all LOVE to play footy (Australian Rules Football).
• The girls in our class love to talk!
• We all have blogs which you can find in the right sidebar.
• We love receiving comments!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs G

A World Without Adults

We started learning about the Six Thinking Hats today. The Hats help us to think about things in different ways and can help us make balanced decisions. We learned that the Black Hat is about identifying the negative aspects of an idea and the Yellow Hat is about thinking about the benefits or strengths. Mrs G gave us the topic "A World Without Adults" and we got into groups of three and used the black and yellow hats to think about it from different angles. Even though it sounded like a great idea to start with, once we used the black hat, we realised there would be some problems without adults around!

Yellow Hat Ideas

• We wouldn't have to go to bed early.
• We would not have to get a haircut.
• We would never get told off.
• We wouldn't have to clean our room.
• We wouldn't have to get jobs.
• We would never get in trouble.
• Everything would be free.

Black Hat Ideas

• There would be nobody to wash our clothes.
• There would be no parents to give us kisses and cuddles.
• We would have to cook for ourselves.
• We would need to ride bikes everywhere.
• Little kids might think taking drugs was ok because no adults would tell them not to.
• We might get lost.
• If we got hurt, no-one would help us.
• We wouldn't have houses and furniture

We've been using QR codes in Maths. Our task was to write a number story and then use Qurify to create a QR code for the answer. In Maths tomorrow, we're going to try to solve all the problems and then check our answers by scanning the code! Here are some of the problems we came up with.

Mr Smith had 17 pencils. 12 kids needed to use them. When they had finished, 

only 4 gave them back. 

How many pencils does Mr Smith have now? (Jared)

James had 19 jellybeans. He gave 7 to Jack. Jack gave 2 back to James.

How many jellybeans does James have? (Angela)

I had $23. I gave Mark $7, then Brock gave me $5. I gave Jared $3. 

How many dollars do I have now? ( Adam)

I have 30 cats and 40 dogs. I bought 10 more cats and Alexia bought 1 cat from me. 

How many animals do I have now? (Kya)

Handyman Jared had 18 motorbikes in his shed and they were for sale. 

Jared sold 6 to his mate, Joel, then Mark bought 3 too. 

How many motorbikes does Handyman Jared have now? (Joel)

Love from The Smarties and Mrs G.

Learning Journey

Tonight, we had learning journeys at our school. The school was open late and parents were invited to visit the classroom so we could show them some of the things we've been doing in class.

We used our new iPads and a Google docs form to guide our parents around the classroom. Mrs G is SO PROUD of us. We did such an amazing job of explaining our learning to our parents. She is so HAPPY that we were all so excited to be sharing our learning with our families and how confidently we explained all the things we've been doing!

We have been learning about QR codes and got to use some tonight. Last week, we researched the countries we sent postcards to, then used the Audioboo app to record the information. Mrs G then created QR codes for our recordings and we put them on our Postcard Project display board. We used an app called Scan to read the QR codes so our parents could listen to our recordings. It was really quick and easy!

 

As part of our learning journey, we asked our parents to add a sticky note to our Wallwisher, telling us something they're proud of us for. Use the scroll bars on the side and bottom to see all the stickies.

Love from The Smarties and Mrs G

Our New iPads

Our school is very lucky. We now have some iPads to share between the classes. We were the very first students in the school to try them out! They're still being set up, but Mrs G let us use them to do some research. Each of us needed to find out four interesting facts about the country we're writing to in our Postcard Project. We then recorded them using Audioboo. We also tried out Puppet Pals, which was really fun. We could make up and record little stories and move the characters around the screen with out fingers.

Our postcards are all ready to send! Mrs G will post them tomorrow morning. We really hope we get lots of replies.

This afternoon, our school had a fair. Our class was in charge of the "Guess the Baby" competition. We had baby photos of some of the teachers and we needed to guess who was who. We also had a "Guess the Jellybeans" competition. The winner got the whole jar, full of lollies! There was also a spaghetti eating competition and Remy, Seth and Jai were in it. They all had the hands behind their backs and a plastic bowl of spaghetti in front of them. It was a race to see who could eat all their spaghetti (without hands) the fastest. Jai was the winner!

Love from the Smarties and Mrs G

Projects Galore!

At the moment, we're doing two really exciting projects. The first one is a monster exchange with the Poplar Class in England. We have all drawn monsters and written detailed descriptions of them. Most of them are on the Weebly site we're using for the project. Once they're all done, we'll be drawing the monsters described by the other class, without looking at the pictures first. We will then compare the original drawing with our drawing to see how well we read the descriptions.

Some of the postcards we'll be sending around the world!

Our other project is a postcard exchange. We all collected postcards in the holidays from places we visited, or just from where we live. We are going to be sending them to other classes all around the world and we're very excited about the idea of receiving lots of postcards in return! Some of the countries we are sending them to are Russia, America, Canada, Israel, New Zealand, Switzerland and France, and lots more! We have a display in class where we'll be tracking where we send postcards to and where we get them from. It's a great way to do some writing, while learning about other countries too.

Love from The Smarties and Mrs G

50th Day of School

Today was the 50th day of school. We focused on the number fifty. This morning, we had a good look at the Australian $50 note and the 50 cent coin. We learned that the woman on the note is Edith Cowan, who was Australia's first female politician. She was from Western Australia, just like us! The man on the other side of the note is David Unaipon. He was an aboriginal writer and inventor. The fifty cent coin is a strange shape! It has twelve sides and we learned that shape is called a dodecagon. On one side of the coin is Queen Elizabeth II and on the other side is the Australian Coat of Arms.

This afternoon, Mrs D, a teacher at our school, spoke to our class about what school was like fifty years ago. It was really interesting and we had lots of questions to ask her! Some of the things we learned were:

• some of the games they played at lunchtime were hopscotch, marbles, elastics and knucklebones
• the desks were made of wood and had benches attached for sitting on
• there were no Smartboards, or whiteboards, just blackboards
• they dipped pens in little ink bottles for writing
• they were allowed to go home for lunch, or go to the shop to buy iceblocks at recess time
• the girls learned to sew and knit and the boys learned woodwork and metalwork.

A lot has changed in the last fifty years. Mrs G put us into groups and we had a brainstorm to think about what we think the world might be like in fifty years from now. Some of the ideas we came up with were:

• there will be 3D Smartboards
• voice activated televisions
• voive activated computers
• an Apple Mac touchscreen as big as a Smartboard
• World War 3
• longer pencils
• iPad 6
• $500 notes
• new colours
• electronic blinds
• hologram watches

Mrs G told us about a cartoon she used to watch when she was little. It was called "The Jetsons". It was made fifty years ago, but set in the future. It's like they were trying to predict what it would be like now. We found an episode on YouTube and thought it was great! We did notice that they guessed a few things correctly. We don't have cars that fly and fold up into suitcases yet, but we do have 3D television, video phone calls, robotic vacuum cleaners, travelators and electric toothbrushes!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs G