Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Future Pilots

Today, our class went on an excursion and it was AWESOME! We visited the Flight Experience Centre in Perth, which is a place people can go to to use a flight simulator. It looked exactly like the cockpit of a Boeing 737, with lots of lights, buttons and dials! We all got a chance to pilot the plane, guided by a real life pilot, Captain Chris. Some of us flew over London and saw the Eye and Big Ben and the rest of us flew over New York and saw the Statue of Liberty. It was great fun! While each group waited for our turn in the cockpit, Captain Cait showed us some videos about how planes fly and about all the things airline staff need to do after a plane lands to make it ready to take off again. Tomorrow, we'll be writing about our day, so we'll add more information then. For now, check out this Animoto and other pictures!


A big thankyou to Nikolas' mum, who came along to help and to Mr F, our principal, who drove the bus!




Love from The Smarties and Mrs G

Monday, August 13, 2012

Thanks Brock!

Every Monday in our class, we have Monday Munchies and it’s one of our favourite times of the week! Mrs G brings a fruit or vegetable for us to taste. Some of the things  we have tried are kiwi fruit, broccolini, snow pea shoots, kiwi berries, dragonfruit, rockmelon, persimmon, coconut, tangelos and cauliflower. Mrs G is always so proud of us, because we ALL try everything, even if we’ve had it before and didn’t like it. We know that sometimes we can try a food and not like it (perhaps because it wasn’t quite ripe), however, it’s always a good idea to try it again another time, because we just might find we love it!

Brock decided that he would give Mrs G a break this week and he brought in not one, but TWO Monday Munchies for us to try.  You can see them in the picture above. The orange things are kumquats, which are tiny citrus fruits. You can eat them raw, including the skin, and they’re quite popular for making jams and marmalades.  The other fruit that Brock brought in was something he picked off a tree at his uncle’s house on the weekend. They are Brazilian Grapes. He took a photo to show us the unusual way they grow. They grow right out of the trunk and branches! We’re used to seeing fruit on the end of branches, where the little twigs and leaves are, but these ones don’t grow like that!  Thanks Brock for bringing in such interesting fruits for us to try this week.



Love from The Smarties and Mrs G

Thursday, August 9, 2012

The Wright Brothers




The Wright Brothers are famous for creating the first human controlled aeroplane. Today, we watched a video of their very first flight on December 17th, 1903. We can't imagine a world without aeroplanes, but back then, people travelled by ship if they had to travel long distances over oceans. Wilbur and Orville Wright changed the world forever! We have started researching the Wright Brothers so that we can create timelines of their lives and achievements.

Today, Mark brought in a fantastic book full of facts about flight. Mrs G decided to use it for a lesson today. We were each given a page of information from the book and we had to read it and identify any words we didn't know the meaning of. We looked them up in dictionaries and learned all sorts of new vocabulary!





One of our favourite parts of the day is Daily 5. We love having choices about how we spend our literacy time and our reading has really improved this year! Mrs G took some pictures of us during Daily 5.





We are very excited because we're going on an excursion next Tuesday! We're going to a flight simulator and will all get a chance to sit in the pilot's seat and control a virtual Boeing 737. We can't wait!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs G