The Smarties

Choosing Books to Read

2012-02-01T19:10:00.004+08:00

What a busy day we had today! It was the first day of the school year and we had lots to do. Mrs G is new to our school, so she had to spend some time getting to know us.

This year in Literacy, we'll be doing the Daily 5. Today, we learned how to choose books that are just right for us, using the COW acronym. We need to check that we understand, or comprehend, what the book is about, we need to make sure the book is the right level for us, and we need to choose books we're interested in. To help us check that the book is the right level, we use the five-finger test. We open the book and start reading. Each time we get to a word we don't know, we put one of our fingers down. If we get to five fingers before the end of the page, then the book is probably a bit tricky for us at the moment. We can always go back later in the year and try again if it's a book we really want to read!

This poster is from here

Mrs G has lots of exciting and fun things planned for us this term and we're looking forward to sharing them on our blog! Hopefully, lots of us will bring back our blogging permission slips tomorrow, so we can start posting photos of our learning.

Love from The Smarties and Mrs G

End of the Year

2011-12-28T18:35:00.001+08:00

Well, the end of the school year arrived more quickly than I expected! We've now been on school holidays for a few weeks and have officially finished Year 2. The class is looking forward to being taught by Miss S next year.

I have a new job in a different school for next year. I'll be teaching Year 3/4 but won't be too far away, so I'll be back to visit. I'll be continuing this blog next year with my new class, and they'll be the Year 3/4 Smarties! I know they're very excited about the chance to learn about blogging and I can't wait to show them!

Not only have I got a new school and a new class, but I also have a new name. I am now Mrs G.

Check back on February 1st for the first post from my new class.

Love from Mrs G (also known as Mrs N!)

Nativity Art

2011-11-23T19:58:00.001+08:00

With just a few weeks of school left for the year, we've started thinking about Christmas! Our art activity today was to make a Nativity scene. We drew a star with oil pastel, then painted the sky and the ground. We tried to make the ground one third of the page and the sky two thirds. We also painted strips of paper to make the stable and Mrs N gave us pictures of Jesus, Mary and Joseph to colour and cut out. Later, we got to draw extra things, like angels, donkeys, cows and sheep to add to our creations. Don't they look cute! We're really looking forward to doing more Christmas arts and crafts in the next few weeks.

Next week, we start swimming lessons. Living in Australia means that many of us spend a lot of time in swimming pools, or at the beach in the Sumner, so it's especially important that we all know how to swim. We are going to walk to the swimming pool and have one lesson after lunch each day for two weeks. It's lots of fun and we can't wait!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Measuring Dinosaurs!

2011-11-14T19:13:00.001+08:00

It's Week 5 of term already and time is flying by! Mrs N was away for three days last week. She hopped on a plane and flew to Brisbane, which is on the other side of Australia, in Queensland. She went to a conference there and met lots of others teachers from all over Australia. She told them about our blog and about how our school teaches writing. Lots of people came up to her afterwards to say they love our blog and that they might start their own. How exciting!

Today, we finished our Australian dinosaur fact book. We used information on the Natural History Museum's website to find out some facts about dinosaurs that used to live in Australia. In Maths, we checked the fact books we made to see how long each of the dinosaurs was, then in groups, we cut strips of paper to represent the length of each one so we could compare them. Some of them were HUGE and would barely have fitted into our undercover area!

This week, we're learning about contractions. The word "contract" has a few different meanings, but in this case, it means to make something smaller. A contraction is a word that's made up of two words, with some letters missed out. An apostrophe is used to represent the missing letters. Some examples of contractions are:

can't = can not

I'll = I will

she's = she is

I'm = I am

We love listening to stories and we've found a new website where stories are read to us! It's called Tumble Books and there are lots and lots of stories to listen to. Our favourites so far are Wait and See by Robert Munsch, which is about a girl whose birthday wishes always come true, and Little Pea by Amy Krouse Rosenthal, which is about a green pea whose parents make him eat lollies for dinner every single day! They're really funny stories and we've listened to them both quite a few times already.

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Off to the Museum!

2011-11-04T20:21:00.001+08:00

Wednesday was such an exciting day! We arrived at school with our lunches, hats and water bottles all packed and ready to go to the museum. There were so many exciting things to do there, we didn't want to leave at the end of the day! Brad, one of the people who works there, taught us some things about dinosaurs and then showed us how to do some activities. We were junior palaeontologists for the day and spent some time digging for fossils and investigating dinosaurs. It was a lot of fun and we learned lots!

We wrote about our trip to the museum and all the interesting things we did. Here is Samantha, Jay and Jenaya's writing.

We went to the museum. On the bus, I sat near Declan and when we got to Perth, we looked out of the window and looked at the city. We finally got to the museum. When we got off the bus, we had recess and the Pre-Primaries came with us too. After recess, we had photos then we had a lesson. We did dinosaur footprints, a bone puzzle and there were four more activities. Those two were my favourite ones. We had lunch. After lunch, we went in groups and my group went up the bridge. Then, we went on the bus back to school.

By Samantha

We went on a bus to the museum. It was getting very hot on the bus. I saw a lot of things. After the long trip, we finally got to Perth. We were waiting for a guy to come. Then, that guy led us to an activity. We did six activities. We did a puzzle, footprints of dinosaurs and a fossil finding game. Then we had to match fossils. We went into groups and looked around, then we went home.

By Jay

Yesterday, we went to the museum. We got on the bus. I was sitting next to Tatiana and Sam. It was so hot! When we got off the bus, we had recess. I had an apple and chips. It was yummy. Then, we took a photo on the stairs to put on the blog. Then, we had a lesson with a man named Brad. He talked about dinosaurs. We did activities like sifting sand, dinosaur footprints, fossil searching in rock, bone puzzles (it was hard!), a grid fossil search and a mystery fossil bag. Then, we had lunch. I had a sandwich and cake. Then, we grouped up with our friends. First, we went down the elevator and we looked at dinosaur bones and other things. Then, we went on the bus. I sat next to Makayla and Tatiana. It took an hour, then we got to schoo.

By Jenaya

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Dinosaur Discoveries

2011-11-01T21:40:00.000+08:00

Our finished dinosaur fossils

We're so excited about our excursion to the museum tomorrow. We could barely contain ourselves today!

We learned about some of the different types of dinosaurs today and we learned some new words.

Carnivores - animals that eat meat

Herbivores - animals that eat plants

Omnivores - animals that eat both meat and plants

We learned that most dinosaurs were herbivores, some were carnivores and just a few were omnivores. Of course, many herbivores accidentally ate insects and other small animals when they chomped the leaves from the trees!

Palaeontologists are scientists that study prehistoric life. They can work out what dinosaurs ate in a few different ways. One way is to look at tooth fossils. If the teeth are pointed and long, they were probably carnivores. If they were spoon or peg shaped, they were probably herbivores who used their teeth to strip leaves from branches. Herbivore dinosaurs didn't usually chew their food. They'd swallow the leaves whole, then digest them in their stomach, sometimes with the help of stones they had swallowed to help grind the food up inside them!

When we've been learning about non-fiction books, Mrs N told us that most non-fiction books contain photographs of the subject, while fiction books usually have drawings or paintings. Today, we noticed that non-fiction books about dinosaurs don't contain any photos of real dinosaurs and we wondered why. It's because there were no cameras (or people) when the dinosaurs were alive, which means that nobody really knows that they looked like. Palaeontologists can make guesses based on their bones and other little clues left behind but we don't really know about the colours or textures of their skin. So, we discovered that non-fiction books about dinosaurs are one of the subjects that won't contain real photographs.

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Catching Up!

2011-10-31T20:11:00.002+08:00

This is a catch-up post about some of the things that have been happening lately! We'll get back to posting more regularly again now.

At the end of last term, we were sad to say goodbye to Miss J, our student teacher, who left us to go back to university. We had lots of fun with her and learned all sorts of great things! She has a job for next year already and we think her class will be very lucky to have her! Hopefully, she'll be back to visit us before the end of the year.

We've just had two weeks holiday. Most of us had lots of fun, except for Amy, who had to stay in hospital for part of it! She's all better now, so that's good news. Some of the things we did in the holidays were: going to the movies, riding bikes, going camping, having sleep-overs and playing computer games. This term, we only have eight and a half weeks of school before our time in Year 2 is up! That time is going to go so fast and soon it'll be Summer holidays.

This term, we're learning all about old things, like dinosaurs and fossils. On Wednesday, we're taking a trip in a bus to go and visit the museum. They have a display of all sorts of things to do with dinosaurs and we can't wait to see it!

We did some dinosaur art last week. We learned that some people think that the dinosaurs became extinct (which means they all died) because really big meteors (rocks from outer space) hit Earth. In our pictures, we drew a meteor with oil pastels, then painted the background with water colours. After tracing and cutting some dinosaur silhouettes in black, we glued them onto the background. They look fantastic hanging up in our classroom.

We also made some dinosaur fossils. Everyone received a piece of clay and then we picked out a little toy dinosaur. We made the clay into a flat circle shape, then pressed the dinosaur into it. When we pulled it out, we could see the imprint of the dinosaur. They look really cool! We painted them today with brown and black paints to make them look like they'd just been dug out of the ground. Maybe we'll see some real fossils at the museum!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

A Visit to the Park

2011-09-20T21:31:00.000+08:00

We went on an excursion today! As we've been learning all about the Noongar seasons, we visited a special park that has a display all about them. Each season has a wooden pole and special things about the season, such as foods, or plants that are common at that time of year, are carved into the wood. There was also a really great playground too. We ate our morning tea on the grass, then had a play! It was a really fun visit.

The Smarties with Miss J, our practising teacher

At our school, every class has an Italian language lesson each week with Signora L. She taught us a song to help us learn the names of body parts. It's a song you might already know the English version of - Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes!

Italian Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes by thesmarties

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Verbs, Pears, Shapes and Seasons

2011-09-06T20:41:00.002+08:00

We've been learning about verbs. A verb is a word used to describe an action. Words like run, eat, play, sleep and bounce are all examples of verbs. During spelling groups today, some of us played an online verb game, which was really fun. We needed to read the words in the balloons and tap on them if they were verbs.

This week for Monday Munchies we tasted delicious, crunchy, sweet, juicy pears! They were absolutely yummy! When we cut them in half, we noticed small black seeds inside. Pears can be eaten like an apple, leaving the core and the seeds behind. Some people like to cook pears and have them as a dessert with ice-cream too.

We're really good at identifying two-dimensional shapes, like rectangles, rhombuses, hexagons and triangles, so now we're learning about three-dimensional shapes! 3D shapes are not flat if you put them on a table. They have three dimensions - length, width and height. We created cubes and learned that they have 8 corners and 6 faces. Some examples of cubes are dice and boxes with square faces. Here's a website that explains the difference between two and three dimensional shapes.

We all know about the seasons called Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter, but we didn't know that the Noongar people have their own seasons too! With Miss J and Mrs P's help, we learned about them today. The aboriginal people in this area have six seasons, each lasting around two months. The food they hunt and gather and where they live are determined by the seasons. In a few weeks, we're going on an excursion to learn more about the Noongar seasons. Here are the names of the seasons and the months they cover. Sometimes, the spelling might be a little bit different.

Birak - December & January
Bunuru - February & March
Djeran - April & May
Makuru - June & July
Djilba - August & September
Kambarang - October & November

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Counting in Noongar

2011-08-31T19:45:00.001+08:00

Our school is located in the south-west of Australia, where the aboriginal people are called Noongar. It is also the name of their language. We've started learning some Noongar words, with the help of our Aboriginal Teacher Assistant, Mrs P. So far, we've learned how to count to ten!

Noongar Numbers by thesmarties

one - keyen

two - koodjal

three - dambart

four - koodjal koodjal

five - maar

six - maar-keyen

seven - maar-koodjal

eight - maar-dambart

nine - maar-koodjal koodjal

ten - maar-maar

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

A New Smartie!

2011-08-25T19:08:00.001+08:00

We have a brand new Smartie! His name is Cole and he started at our school this week. He already knew Taj from playing football, but he's making lots of friends with the other children in our class and is enjoying being at our school.

This week in spelling groups, we're revising the sounds we've been learning over the last four weeks. Today, we played games to give us some extra practice in a fun way! We were learning about short and long vowel sounds, words that have ch, sh or wh at the beginning, words with oar, ore, or and wor, and words ending with cher, ture, ure and cher. Here are some pictures of us practising our spelling.

Our school choir entered a competition today. Tatiana, Jenaya, Anastacia, Makayla, Paige and Cathy all hopped on a bus after recess and travelled to the competition. They're getting back after school finishes, so we're not sure how they went, but we bet they were great! Some of them were a bit nervous before they left, but maybe they were just really, really excited.

The Smarties members of the school choir

We did a fun little art activity today. We made elephants pictures. Mrs N gave us a line drawing of an elephant on a piece of paper. We needed to look through magazines and find pictures that we liked in nice bright colours. We glued them onto the back of the elephant, making sure we covered it all. To check whether we'd left any white spaces, we held our pictures up to the window and the sunlight made it really easy to see through. Once we'd covered the elephant, we cut it out, then added the ear, tusk and tail using the typed part of the magazines. We think they look really great hanging in a long row in our classroom, almost like they're walking in a line!

Creating our elephants

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Book Week Dress Ups!

2011-08-24T23:20:00.001+08:00

What an exciting day we had at school today! It's Book Week and everyone got to dress up as their favourite book character. There are so many amazing characters in books, it was difficult to choose our favourites! It was lots and lots of fun, especially during assembly when we went up the front and told the whole school who we were dressed as. Thanks to our mums and dads for helping us with our costumes.

Our rain sticks are finished! They took a long time to get done, because we had to leave them to dry between each layer of paper mache and paint. We decorated them with feathers, beads, coloured string and metallic pens and we're really happy with them.

We are becoming experts on the water cycle. We understand that water is constantly moving around the cycle and it doesn't really have a beginning or an end point. We created water cycle collages to show how well we understand it. There were lots of big words for us to learn, but Mrs N says we did an excellent job remembering them all!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Cystic Fibrosis Wacky Hair Day

2011-08-22T21:09:00.002+08:00

Last Friday, our school had a Wacky Hair Day to raise money for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. Paige, one of the Smarties, has CF so our class organised it in her honour. She wrote about what it's like to have it and read it out in front of the whole school at assembly. Here's what she wrote:

CF is short for Cystic Fibrosis, but little kids called it "sixty five roses". Part of my daily treatment is taking tablets every time I eat. I also spend up to one hour a day doing physio and have lots of time in hospital where I have to have lots of needles and pricks, but not all of it is bad.

I get to eat junk food like chips, chocolate and cheese all the time. I also get to meet nice people at hospital. I got to go to the Gold Coast when I was six, organised by Make-a-Wish. They understand how hard it is having to do so much treatment and it was good to go to the theme parks. I still had to do all my physio and take tablets, but it was still fun.

I will always have to take tablets and do nebs and physio to stay healthy because there isn't a cure for CF. Danica wants to grow up and be a medical scientist and find a cure for Cystic Fibrosis. I think she'll be able to do it.

We showed the whole school a video that explains what CF is and how it effects the people who have it. We've seen the video before but thought it would be good for everyone to see it so they could understand why we were raising money.

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

The Rainbow Serpent

2011-08-18T18:50:00.001+08:00

Miss J has been teaching us about the Rainbow Serpent. It is a Dreamtime story, explaining how Aboriginal people believe the mountains, river and animals were created. She gave us each a part to illustrate and we have put them together to make a complete story.

Last week, we wrote expositions about whether cats or dogs make better pets. We were trying to persuade Mrs N to get one. After brainstorming lots of reasons why dogs are better than cats, or cats are better than dogs, we chose our best three reasons and wrote about them. Today, we used paper plates to make cute cats and dogs for our display.

Each week, we get ten spelling words to learn and then Mrs N tests us on Fridays to check how well we learned them. We know about this great site where we can practise our words using the "look, cover, write, check" method. We can add our spelling list words and do as much practice as we need! We also do activities in class in our spelling groups to give us some extra help.

Miss J has been teaching us about number stories this week. A number story is a way to ask a Maths problem. We need to use the information in the story to work out the answer. Sometimes, it's tricky to decide whether it's an addition or subtraction problem, but there are certain words we can look for to give us clues. Here are some examples:

Samantha has 2 dogs and 3 cats.

How many pets does she have altogether?

2 + 3 = 5

Samantha has five pets.

Tieg had 4 pencils, but he lost 1.

How many pencils does he have left?

4 - 1 = 3

Tieg has three pencils left.

Here's a really fun website that's a lot like Mrs N's favourite video game - Frogger! A question appears at the bottom and we need to move the frog to the answer without letting it get hit by a car, or fall in the water. We love finding fun ways to practise our Maths skills.

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Rain Sticks

2011-08-17T21:07:00.004+08:00

We've been making rain sticks in art, which are musical instruments from Peru. They're hollow tubes, usually filled with pebbles. When they're turned vertically, the pebbles run down the tube, making a sound like rain. Traditionally, they're made from a dried cactus with the spikes pushed in. As the pebbles hit the spikes, they make the sound.

We didn't have any cacti at our school, so Miss J gave us each a cardboard tube instead. We glued paper over one end to seal it, then scrunched and rolled some aluminium foil and put it inside the tube. Carefully, we tipped in some rice, beads and dried pasta, then sealed the other end up. We practised turning our rain stick over and it really did sound like rain!

Using paper mache, we covered the tube with a few layers and left it to dry. Today, we added some layers of paint as a base coat and we're going to be decorating them with patterns, beads, wool and feathers. They're going to look fantastic!

We're learning all about water this term. We watched a movie about the water cycle and learned that water is constantly moving through a cycle and has been doing it for millions of years. The water that we drink from the tap could be the very same water that dinosaurs and cavemen drank!

There are four main stages in the water cycle:

Evaporation - water droplets are heated and then turn into water vapour which floats up towards the sky
Condensation - the water vapour turns into clouds and the wind blows them around the sky
Precipitation - the clouds release the water as rain, snow or hail and it falls back to the earth
Collection - the water pools together and runs to low places, such as rivers, oceans and lakes

The water cycle then starts all over again when the water evaporates into the air.

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Catching Up

2011-08-10T23:01:00.003+08:00

Mrs N has been having trouble logging into Blogger, so we haven't had a post for a while. She's finally managed to log on, so here's what we've been up to in the last week!

In Maths, we've been learning about the language of position. This refers to words used to describe where things are. On, under, beside, left, right and over are all examples of this. We played barrier games with a partner to help us practise. We each had the same picture in front of us, but we hid it from our partner. We needed to add things to the picture, then describe where we added them to our partner. They drew them in the same place, according to our directions. At the end, we compared the pictures to see how well we described the positions and how well we listened to the directions.

We've also been playing some new Maths games, including MAB Bingo. This helps us practise our place value skills and is lots of fun too!

We received some new art supplies last week. They're watercolour pencils. They look like ordinary coloured pencils, but they're special. We traced around some leaf shapes, then coloured them in with our new pencils. Afterwards, we carefully painted over them with a paintbrush dipped in water and, like magic, the colour turned into water colour paints! They look really effective and colourful. Mrs N especially likes the way we used two colours on some of our leaves, because they blended together when we painted them and look extra nice.

Danica brought her new baby sister in for news this week. Her name is Eirinn and she's just a few weeks old. Danica likes to help her mum look after her, except when she needs to put the used nappies in the bin!

Danica with beautiful baby Eirinn

In Literacy, we've been revising how to make plurals, writing persuasive texts trying to convince Mrs N whether she should get a cat or a dog, learning all about compound words and reading, reading, reading! We especially love using the whisper phones Mrs N made from pvc tubing and some plumbing supplies. When we whisper into them, we can hear ourselves loudly, so we don't disturb the other children reading next to us.

We've had quite a few Smarties away sick this week and we miss them! Hopefully, they'll be feeling better soon and will be back at school having lots of fun and learning lots!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Plurals and Science

2011-07-29T21:53:00.004+08:00

In spelling today, we learned about plurals. A plural is a word used to describe more than one of something. For example, the plural of dog is dogs and the plural of box is boxes.

Sometimes we need to just add an "s" to a noun to make it plural, but sometimes we need to add "es". It can be tricky to know which to do, but we found an easy way that works with most words!

After sorting lots of words and looking carefully at how they're spelled, we discovered that words that end with s, x, ch and sh all need es added to make them plural. Most other words just need an s added. We should be able to remember that and it'll make spelling plurals easy. There are some exceptions to the rule, such as calf becoming calves, but we'll learn about those another day!

We've been working on some interesting art this week. After writing recounts of our holidays, Mrs N took photos of us posing like we were doing something we wrote about in our recounts. We then cut ourselves out of the photos and drew a background for them. It was fun to do and we think they look really interesting.

Brydie playing Wii Bowling

Stephany on a giant jumping pillow

Julie getting her cast off at the doctor's

Jacinta with the crayfish she caught

This term, we're learning all about water. In Science today, Miss J helped us do an experiment to test which substances dissolve in water. Dissolving means that it becomes completely mixed in with the water. She gave us some cups with cold and warm water in them and things like sugar, coffee, tea leaves, glitter, sand and salt. We mixed them with both types of water and observed what happened. We noticed that some things dissolved and some didn't.Sugar, salt and coffee all dissolved easily, especially in the warm water. The tea leaves dissolved a bit and turned the water brown, but there were still bits floating around. Glitter and sand didn't dissolve at all!

Tea leaves in warm and cold water

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

A New Term

2011-07-27T16:12:00.003+08:00

We're back from holidays and the new term is looking busy already!

Danica and Jenaya had particularly exciting holidays because their mums both had a baby! Jenaya's new little brother is named Craig and Danica's little sister is Eirinn. We've had a peek at them both and they're gorgeous!

Jenaya and Craig

While new babies are pretty exciting, the other Smarties had good holidays too! Some of us went swimming, ten-pin bowling, to watch a soccer match, or performed in dancing concerts. Julie and Anastacia finally had their plaster casts removed too! We've written recounts about our holidays and you can read some of them on our class writing blog.

We're very lucky to have Miss J, a student teacher, in our room this term. We're really looking forward to all the exciting lessons she has planned for us. She's already been teaching us about some new shapes, like rhombuses and hexagons. Today, we drew animals using a shape as part of the body.

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

100th Day

2011-07-07T23:01:00.000+08:00

Today was the 100th day of being in Year 2! We celebrated with some activities about the number 100.

Mrs N modified a shopping catalogue so that all the foods were whole dollars, with no cents. We needed to write a shopping list that totaled exactly $100 and we could choose anything we wanted. It was pretty fun to imagine doing some shopping! We used a calculator and tally marks to check our totals.

Another activity involved counting 100 objects and then weighing them, so we could compare how much one hundred of each thing weighs. We counted and measured popsticks, matchsticks, cotton balls, cotton tips, grains of rice, straws, plastic tiles, feathers, counters, plastic teddies and lots of other things. We discovered that 100 grains of rice were the lightest and 100 plastic teddies were the heaviest.

Finally, we began writing 100 words. Our classroom is full of useful words, so it was easy to find enough, but we ran out of time! Maybe we'll get to finish it tomorrow.

Our 100th day of Year 2 was great fun!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

NAIDOC Week

2011-07-06T21:09:00.000+08:00

This week is NAIDOC Week, which is a time when we celebrate the culture of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. We spent the morning doing all sorts of fun things! Our guest speaker brought in some bush tucker, which is food that traditional Aborigines gather from plants to eat. We tasted Muntharis, Dumbari and Bunya Bunya.

Some of us painted our faces, not with paint, but with ochre mixed with water! We tapped rocks together to get dust from them and then stirred in enough water to make a paste. We used our fingers to make dots and lines on our faces.

We also got a chance to play a didgeridoo. These are musical instruments made from the hollow trunks of trees. Traditionally, only men and boys can use them, so the boys were allowed to use the real didgeridoos. The girls weren't left out though! They played didgeridoos made from bamboo instead. We had to keep our lips loose and blow raspberries into the end of the tube to try to make a noise. This video shows what it's supposed to sounds like. It was hard, but lots of fun!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Tints and Shades

2011-06-30T22:31:00.001+08:00

In Art this week, we learned about tints and shades. A tint is a colour you get by adding white to some paint and a shade is when you add black. A tint is lighter than the original and a shade is darker. We learned how to draw cubes using a square piece of card. It was easier than we thought it would be! We then used our original colour to paint the front of the cube, the tint to paint the top and the shade to fill in the side. The combination of colours helps our cubes look three-dimensional. We can't wait to experiment more with mixing paints next term.

We've been doing some more learning about homophones. Miss H gave us lots of magazines and asked us to find pictures of things whose names can be homophones. We created a poster to display in our classroom.

It's almost the holidays, which means that we're just about at the end of our unit of work about Australia. Elise's mum brought us a poster from the post office which has pictures of some new stamps that are being released this week. They have drawings of Australian animals on them. They inspired us to design our own postage stamps! We needed to choose either an animal or a landmark that we had learned about and we drew them with a postage stamp border. Real stamps have the word "Australia", the name of what is drawn on them and the price of the stamp. We made sure we included all that information on our stamps too.

Koala

The Three Sisters

Western Swamp Tortoise

Uluru

Our visit to the zoo a few weeks ago really made us think about animal habitats and the animal homes we saw there. In class, we were given the challenge of designing an enclosure for an animal of our choice. We needed to use our knowledge of zoos and our knowledge of animals and think about their needs and wants to design a perfect enclosure. We drew then on paper first, labelling all the main parts, then we borrowed the blocks and plastic animals from Pre-Primary and created a zoo in our classroom!

We received letters from our Skype buddies, 2MK in Victoria. It was great to read about what they learned from us about our state.

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Golden Wattle

2011-06-23T17:18:00.002+08:00

The Golden Wattle is the national flower of Australia. It's a really beautiful plant that has bright yellow flowers that look like little, fluffy balls. This week, in art, we drew some golden wattles using oil pastels on black paper. We think they turned out really great!

In English, Miss H has been teaching us about homophones. These are words that sound the same, but have different spelling and different meanings. Understanding homophones can help us with our spelling! Some of the examples we've been learning about are:

hear - I can hear a noise.

here - Come over here, please.

two - I have two pencils.

to - I'm going to the supermarket.

too - I'd like an apple too.

there - Look over there!

their - That is their dog.

they're - They're going to the movies.

right - The car turned right at the lights.

write - I need to write a shopping list.

which - I wonder which one he will choose.

witch - Jane dressed up as a witch for the concert.

Here's a homophones quiz, where we can test our knowledge!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Zoo and Skyping!

2011-06-20T22:24:00.000+08:00

Mrs N has been extra busy writing lots of nice things about us in our Semester 1 reports, so she hasn't had time to update our blog for a while. Lots has been happening!

Last Friday, we all hopped on a bus and travelled to the Perth Zoo. When we arrived, we carried all of our lunches to the grassed area and had our morning snack. After that, we went off in groups of three or four, with a parent helper and we visited as many animals as we could! There was a special section just for Australian animals, so most of us headed there first. We saw kangaroos, emus, quokkas, echidnas, wombats, dingoes, cockatoos, wallabies and numbats, which are many of the animals we've been learning about in class! We also saw lots of snakes and lizards, nocturnal animals like possums and bilbies, as well as animals from other countries, like lions, sunbears and otters. It was a fantastic day!

This morning, we Skyped with 2MK in Victoria. Their class is learning about Australia this term too, so our teachers organised to video chat so that we could teach each other about our states. We asked each other lots of interesting questions and we learned some new things about Victoria.

Their state animal is the Leadbeater's Possum.
Their state bird is the Helmeted Honeyeater.
The aquatic emblem is the Weedy Seadragon.
The body of water closest to Victoria, is Bass Strait, which is a channel that sits between Victoria and Tasmania.
People in Victoria are crazy about Australian Rules Football (AFL) and they invented the big competition that now has teams from most of our states competing in each season.
The Victorian flag looks like this:

Victorian State Flag

Tamarillos

Our Monday Munchies food this week was a really pretty fruit called a Tamarillo. None of us had ever tried one before and at first, we didn't know what it was. It had a smooth, dark red skin and was shaped like an egg. We thought it looked a bit like a passionfruit and a bit like a tomato. When Mrs N cut into it, we could see lots of seeds and pulp, a bit like a tomato. In fact, tamarillos used to be called tree tomatoes, so our guess was pretty good! We used spoons to scoop out some of the seeds, pulp and flesh and we all had a taste. Some of us came back for seconds and thirds, because it was so delicious!

Stephany has some gorgeous new glasses. Her eyes had been getting sore, so her mum took her to the optometrist, who is someone that checks eyesight. He said she needed glasses, so Stephany picked the ones she liked and the optometrist put the right sort of lenses in them. Now her eyes shouldn't get so sore and she looks great too!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

The Great Barrier Reef

2011-06-15T16:56:00.022+08:00

As part of our studies on Australia, Miss H has been teaching us about the Great Barrier Reef. This is a very, very big coral reef off the coast of Queensland in eastern Australia. Yesterday, we watched a video about it and saw the colourful fish and coral that live there. This morning, we created beautiful pictures of fish, using cotton tips dipped in paint. We drew a fish and its underwater habitat, then dotted the paint all over the page. It took a long time and our hands were a little sore by the time we finished, but they look amazing! Thankyou to Elise's mum for helping us.

This morning, we went on a treasure hunt! We're going to be learning about writing directions, so Mrs N organised a list of instructions for us to follow. In small groups, Brydie's mum took us around the school, searching for the treasure, following the directions. Eventually, we found it and enjoyed our surprise chocolate treasure!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Aussie Slang

2011-06-14T17:20:00.002+08:00

There are many countries in the world that speak English, but sometimes they have some words that are only used in that country. These are called slang words. Miss H has been teaching us about some Australian slang. We learned that words like cuppa, bikkie, arvo, pressie and stickybeak are not used in most other countries, even though we use them all the time here. Tomorrow, we're making a wiki page and writing some definitions for those words and lots more!

Farbstudie Quadrate by Wassily Kandinsky

We had a fun art activity to do today. We had a look at a painting by Wassily Kandinsky, a russian painter. He used lots of circles in little boxes to make one of his pictures and we started making our own version. Our paper was folded up so there are 16 boxes and we're using permanent markers to draw circles in each one. They're looking really colourful and it's really fun to do.

Today we learned how to measure in centimetres (or cms for short). We used a game from Funbrain to practise, then we measured lots of lines on a piece of paper. We were pretty good at that, so then we needed to draw lines of certain lengths. We were so clever, we used some half centimetre measurements too!

The weather is rainy and cold in Western Australia right now. Winter started a few weeks ago, so we've written some acrostic poems about wintery things. You can read some of them on our writing blog. Hopefully, the rain will go away so we have some nice weather for our trip to the zoo on Friday!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

What am I?

2011-06-09T12:19:00.048+08:00

We're becoming experts on Australian animals and can't wait until our visit to the zoo next week! Miss H asked us to use our knowledge of animals, as well as some fact sheets from the Perth Zoo website to write "What am I?" quizzes. We're making them into a lift-the-flap book so we can guess the animals we all researched. Can you guess what animals these might be? The answers are at the bottom of this post.

I have a black bill and flippers. I live in the oceans in the south of Australia. I eat fish. I am 37-43cm tall and weigh 1-1.2kg. What am I? (by Samantha)

I have a large frill. I live in northern Australia. I eat insects. I am up to 30cm long. What am I? (by Taj)

I have black fur. I live in south-west Western Australia. I eat eucalytpus, marri and peppermint tree leaves. I am 30-35cm long and weigh 70-160g. What am I? (by Tatiana)

I have a reddish-brown coat. I live in central Australia. I eat grasses and plants. I am 74-140cm tall and weigh 26-66kgs. What am I? (by Jacinta)

I have a long, slender neck. I live all over Australia, except for central Australia. I eat mostly waterplants. I am 100-140cm long and lay 3-9 eggs. What am I? (by Brydie)

Miss H was at her university this afternoon, so we got a chance to start our top-secret project for her. We can't tell you what it is yet, but we hope she loves it! We love having her in our classroom and we want to show her how much we'll miss her when she's gone at the end of the term.

Stephany has a new swimming pool at her house. A big crane and some workmen installed it last week and they took some photos. She hasn't been swimming in it yet, but she can't wait until she does! Stephany and her dad made a PowerPoint presentation to show us the steps involved in putting a pool in the ground. Thanks Steph!

New Pool

View more presentations from Lisa

Here are the answers to our "What am I?" quizzes.

Little Penguin

Frilled Dragon

Western Ringtail Possum

Red Kangaroo

Black Swan

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Australian Coins

2011-06-08T13:43:00.038+08:00

Last week, Sharni spotted a platypus on a 20 cent coin. Today we learned that there are a few other animals on our coins, as well as some non-animal things too! We also noticed that all of our coins have a picture of the Queen on one side (the "heads" side). On the "tails" side, we have:

5¢ - echidna

10¢ - lyrebird

20¢ - platypus

50¢ - Australian Coat of Arms

$1 - kangaroos

$2 - an aborigine

We all had a great long weekend, so we wrote sentences about it using Wallwisher. (You might need to scroll and move the posts around to read them all.)

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

No Hair!

2011-06-04T10:26:00.001+08:00

Mrs B

The kindy teacher at our school, Mrs B, did an amazing thing at assembly yesterday. She had her hair all cut off! She wanted to raise money for cancer research so she asked people to sponsor her. This means that people said that they'd donate money if she did it, and she did! She's raised over $2000 and we're all very proud of her. The teachers gave her some new hats to wear so her head doesn't get too cold while it's growing back!

Mrs B is extra special because she had cancer last year, so she knows how hard it can be and how sick it can make you feel. She really wants to help stop people from getting sick in the future, so by doing such a brave thing and raising money for cancer research, she is helping scientists and doctors find a cure.

Our school fair is being held this weekend. We decided to make some signs for the White Elephant stall. We made posters with prices on them, as well as words like "books", "shoes" and "clothes" so the people working there could label all the different areas. The fair raises lots of money for our school, so we can buy new things to help us learn, like computers and books!

We spent some time in the library yesterday using the laptops. We were learning about how to use bullets in Microsoft Word. Bullets are little dots that appear at the beginning of each line. We can use them when we're writing a list of things and want them to stand out and be easy to read. Mrs N uses them on our blog sometimes. We wrote some facts about platypuses using bullets and displayed them with our platypus habitat art.

We won't be back at school until Wednesday, because we have an extra-long weekend. We've been working super hard this term and learning so much. It'll be nice to give our brains and bodies a break for a few days!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Platypuses

2011-06-02T23:17:00.003+08:00

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

Skype Buddies

2011-05-31T19:15:00.000+08:00

We've been learning all about Australia and we're learning all sorts of things. We decided that a great way to learn about another part of Australia is to ask the people who live there, so that's what we're going to do! Next week, we're going to be Skyping with our blogging buddies, 2MK. They're a grade 2 class in Victoria, Australia and they're going to be teaching us about their state and we'll be telling them all about ours! It'll be great fun and we can't wait.

We designed some Australian tourist t-shirts. We needed to include the word "Australia" but other than that, we could add anything we wanted. Some of us chose to use the colours green and gold, which are the colours of the uniforms many of the Australian sporting teams wear. Others used red, white and blue from the Australian flag. A couple of us even included the Aboriginal flag into our designs, as well as a lizard or two! We think they look great hanging in our classroom.

For Monday Munchies yesterday, we tried an unusual fruit called a Persimmon. At first, we thought they were tomatoes, but when Mrs N cut one open, we could see that it looks nothing like a tomato inside. It has black seeds and firm, orange flesh. It was crunchy and juicy and pretty delicious. Most of us liked it and came back for a second try!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Aussie Thongs

2011-05-27T20:11:00.000+08:00

We've been busy with some Australian art projects and they're finally finished! For the first one, we made thongs, which are classic Australian footwear. Lots of people like to wear them in the Summer at the beach. Unfortunately, ours are only made of paper, so we can't wear them, but they're brightening up our classroom!

Our second art activity was painting the Australian and Aboriginal flags. We think they turned out great!

Jenaya brought in some Aboriginal artefacts for us to look at. She had a shield and a boomerang, as well as a poster of a dance group that her dad is in. They were really interesting to look at!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

The Aboriginal Flag

2011-05-25T23:02:00.001+08:00

The Aboriginal Flag

As part of our Australia theme this term, we've learned about our flags. Last week, we learned about the different parts of the official Australian flag and this week we've learned about the Aboriginal one. It has three colours, which each represent something. The yellow is for the Sun, which provides life. The red is for the earth, which is a reddish colour in many parts of the outback. The black represents the dark-coloured skin of the aboriginal people.

Every Wednesday morning, we have lots of parent helpers in our classroom. This morning, we had Sharni's dad, Elise's mum, Brydie's mum and Tieg's mum. They helped us with a couple of art projects we've been working on.

With the help of Sharni's dad, we each painted an aboriginal flag. We folded a piece of paper exactly in half, then traced a round lid in the middle and painted it all in the correct colours. Tieg's mum helped us paint a blue background for an Australian flag. We coloured in a Union Jack with textas and we'll be gluing it, and some stars, onto the background tomorrow. Brydie and Elise's mum helped us work on our Aussie thong artwork. We traced around our feet, cut them out and then used a split pin to attach the straps to our thongs. Mrs N then taped the ends of the straps to the back and they look like real shoes! You'll be able to see all of our amazing art work on Friday, when Mrs N posts them!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

The Australian Flag

2011-05-20T23:04:00.007+08:00

At assembly this morning, Mr Randall, a member of parliament, visited our school to present us with some new flags. One was the Australian flag and the other was the Aboriginal flag. He spoke to us about what the different parts of the Australian flag mean and later on, we wrote about them in class. You can read some of them on our writing blog. We learned that:

we have a Union Jack in the corner of our flag, because we are a colony of Britain,
the seven pointed star is called the "Federation Star" and it has 7 points, which represent the states and territories of Australia, and
the group of stars on the right is the Southern Cross which is a special constellation that can be seen in the southern hemisphere, which is where Australia is.

Last year, our school participated in the Coles Sports for Schools programme. Our friends and families collected vouchers when they did their shopping at Coles and then we could spend them on sports equipment. We managed to collect 38,000 vouchers and our order arrived this week! We unpacked it all and took some photos. We feel very lucky to have so many new things and we can't wait to play with it!

As a special treat this afternoon, our class visited the Year 7 classroom. In a few weeks, our school is having a fair and the Year 7s will be having a face-painting stalll. They needed some volunteers to practise on, so Mrs N volunteered us. It was lots of fun!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Cystic Fibrosis Awareness

2011-05-19T18:29:00.000+08:00

May is Cystic Fibrosis (CF) awareness month. One of the Smarties, Paige, has CF and her mum emailed Mrs N a link to a great video about it. We watched it in class today, then asked Paige lots of questions! These are some of the things we learned from her:

She has a portacath under her arm, which makes it easier for her to receive her medicine when she's in hospital.
She needs to take enzyme tablets whenever she eats, because her body's enzymes don't work properly to digest her food.
She needs to eat high kilojoule foods, such as potato chips, chocolate and cake to stay healthy.
Children with CF can't play with, or be in the same class as, other children with CF because they can transfer germs to each other and get sick.
She coughs a lot and sometimes needs to cough up mucus from her lungs.
CF is not contagious, which means that you're born with it and can't catch it from anyone else.
Paige loves going to hospital because she gets to lay in bed and she gets to do lots of arts and crafts and play games.

Paige thinks there are some good things about having CF and some not-so-good, but she doesn't know any different, so she's happy!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Aussie Animals Galore!

2011-05-16T22:01:00.001+08:00

Aussie animals have been the theme in our classroom lately.

Last week, Miss H taught us how to take notes while reading a non-fiction book. We recorded information about koalas while she was reading to us. We then used this information to write reports about them. You can read some of them on our writing blog. In Art, we made cute koala masks from paper plates.

Today, we read Possum Magic by Mem Fox. It's a great story about a baby possum, named Hush, who becomes invisible. Hush and her grandmother travel all around Australia, searching for the cure and they get to eat lots of delicious Australia foods! We each wrote a character analysis and even learned how to draw possums by reading some instructions. We were very clever! We'll be doing more activities about Possum Magic during Literacy block this week.

In Maths, we've been practising subtraction with counters and we've been playing a game in pairs. Each person starts with 20 counters and we take turns to roll a dice. We subtract the number of counters shown on the dice and the winner is the person who subtracts all their counters first. To keep score, we use tally marks to record how many games each of us wins. It's lots of fun!

Another Maths skill we've been learning about is sharing objects among groups. For example, if we were really lucky and we got home from school and our Mum gave us a bag of lollies and asked us to divide them up so everyone in the family had an equal share, we'd need to work out the fairest way to do it.

We discovered three ways of sharing that all work pretty well:

Guess and Try - We could look at the pile of lollies and have a guess about how many each person would probably get, then share them out and see if we need to add or take away from any piles
One by One - We could share them out one by one, a bit like when we deal cards if we're playing a card game.
Count and Divide - We could count the lollies and then divide by the number of groups we need, to work out how many will be in each group.

Our Monday Munchies food today was cucumber. Cucumber is a delicious vegetable that we could have in our sandwiches, in salads, or as a snack on its own. It's crunchy and juicy and delicious! The outside is dark green and a little bit bumpy, while the inside is a lighter green with small, soft seeds. We learned that there are lots of vitamins in the skin of fruit and vegetables and it's good to eat it when we can. Some of us hadn't tried cucumber with the skin, but we all tried it today and most of us liked it. We'll be asking our mums and dads to put some in our lunches!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Welcome to Miss H!

2011-05-10T21:11:00.002+08:00

Miss H with The Smarties

Our class is very lucky. We have a student teacher in our classroom this term. Her name is Miss H and she’s really nice! She’s learning how to be a teacher and she’s planning lots of interesting lessons for us. We love having her in our classroom!

This term, we’re learning all about Australia. We brainstormed words about our country. We came up with a lot! We thought of places, animals, people and things we like to do. Mrs N asked us to choose five of those words and put them into sentences. We know a lot about Australia already! Some of the sentences we wrote were:

Echidnas are interesting because they have spikes. (Taj)

Redback spiders are really poisonous spiders. (Declan)

Queensland has the Gold Coast in it. (Paige)

Emus are very fast, but they can’t fly. (Cathy)

Julia Gillard is the first female Prime Minister. (Stephany)

A Platypus is an interesting animal because it has a bill like a duck. (Makayla)

Ned Kelly was a bushranger and he is famous. (Elise)

A platypus can hold its breath underwater. (Aodhan)

The outback is an extremely good place to camp at. (Sharni)

The Tasmanian Devil eats meat. (Brydie)

Yesterday was Monday, which means we got to try another healthy food. This time, it was something brown and furry. It was kiwifruit!

Some of us had eaten them before, but there were quite a few people who hadn’t and we were all eager to have a taste. When Mrs N cut them open, we could see all the tiny black seeds inside. The flesh was a pretty green colour and looked soft. We all had a taste and almost everyone thought they were delicious! Kiwifruit are a really tasty and healthy snack and we’ll be asking our mums and dads to get us some!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Happy Mother's Day!

2011-05-08T21:15:00.000+08:00

The Smarties celebrated Mother's Day on Friday with a special afternoon tea. We invited our mums and grandmothers to our classroom for biscuits and coffee. We decorated the classroom to look like a cafe with pink, green and yellow tablecloths and tissue paper flowers that we had made. It looked really pretty and we got lots of compliments about how great it looked. It was nice to sit down for some special time with our mums.

Julie and her Grandma

Declan and Mum

Ana and Mum

Danica and Mum

For Mother's Day, we made our mums mosaic mirrors. We each chose colours we thought our mum would like, then glued them onto a mirror frame. We made matching handbag cards and wrapped them ourselves. We hope they loved them when they opened them this morning!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

The Last Day of Term

2011-04-19T15:10:00.003+08:00

Today is the last day of Term 1. We're starting two weeks holidays, yay! It's a tradition at our school to have a gigantic Easter raffle on the last day of school before Easter. We had it this afternoon and there were 64 prizes!

This morning, our school held an ANZAC Day service. It's usually commemorated on April 25th, but we'll be on holidays, so we did it today. ANZAC stands for "Australian and New Zealand Army Corps". It's a day where we remember the Australians and New Zealanders who have died in wartime. Some representives from the local Returned and Services League visited our school and Chief Petty Officer Aaron came to our classroom to talk to us. He showed us his medals and talked about what it's like living on a ship in the navy. Here are some of the things we learned:

his ship is an ANZAC class frigate and it's 118 metres long
sometimes they can go fishing from the boat
he has a lot of badges on his uniform and some of them show what his job and rank are
he has some medals for helping in Iraq and Afghanistan
the army, navy and airforce have different uniforms
he has to share a room with 14 other people on the ship
pirates stay away from the ship because they're scared
the bullets from the gun on the ship weigh 20 kilograms
he had to sit some exams to be promoted
some people keep photos of their families inside their hats
it's noisy down below when it's rough and sometimes it's hard to sleep when the water crashes against the side of the ship
everyone on the ship has a special job and Aaron's job is working with radars
he gets sea sick and sometimes has to go outside for some fresh air
he's never seen a shark but he's seen snakes, turtles, dolphins, whales and jellyfish

For Monday Munchies yesterday, our healthy food was pepitas, or pumpkin seeds. They were small and green and yummy. Some of us thought they smelled like bird or guinea pig food, which is true, because birds and guinea pigs like to eat them too! It's a super-healthy people food and is nice sprinkled on salads.

We've been doing lots of Easter arts and crafts (as well as some Mother's Day activities which need to remain secret for now!). We really love using oil pastels and water colours.

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Delicious Blueberries

2011-04-12T18:48:00.001+08:00

For Monday Munchies yesterday we tasted blueberries and they were great! We liked that they were juicy and sweet. They were dark purple in colour, but we thought that "blueberries" was a good name for them.

Delicious blueberries

Mother's Day is on May 8th. Even though that's still almost 4 weeks away, we've started to get organised for it, because we start school holidays next week. Today, we made special invitations for a Mother's Day afternoon tea that our class is having on May 6th. Mrs N taught us how to draw cupcakes and teacups and we put them on our invitations. They look amazing! We made invitations for our mums and our grandmothers.

Cathy with her afternoon tea invitations

We're making our mums something special for Mother's Day, but we can't tell you what it is yet! We don't want to spoil the surprise. To make it, we had to count out fifty little plastic shapes. We discussed the different ways we could do this and decided that making 5 groups of 10, or 10 groups of 5 would work very well. We wouldn't lose track of our counting and it would be easy for us to check how many we had already counted. Knowing about Maths is really useful sometimes!

5 groups of 10 is 50

10 groups of 5 is 50

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Danica's New Glasses

2011-04-07T17:38:00.002+08:00

Danica was away from school yesterday because she was picking up her gorgeous new glasses. She's pretty excited about them and is being very responsible about taking care of them and keeping them clean.

Over the last two days, we've been learning all about vowels. We know that the vowels are a, e, i, o and u but they make different sounds, depending on the words they're in and they can be either long or short. An easy way to work out if the sound is long is to see if you can hear the name of the vowel in the word. If you can, then it's a long vowel sound!

We did some free choice writing this morning and we wrote about some really interesting things. Be sure to check out our writing blog to read some of them!

We've been lucky to have lots of parent help lately. Thankyou to Jacinta, Tieg, Elise and Tatiana's mums, as well as Renee's dad. Lots of parent help means we can do lots of interesting things and we love showing them what we can do!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Beautiful Bunnies

2011-04-05T21:02:00.003+08:00

We really impressed Mrs N in art this week. She learned how to draw a rabbit and then taught us. They turned out so well! We thought the legs were the trickiest part, but we kept trying. After outlining our beautiful bunnies with black markers, we ruled lines in the background, then painted it all with watercolours. We are super-duper at using just the right amount of water on our brushes now.

To go with our bunny art, we also wrote palindrome poetry about Easter. A palindrome is something that can be read both backwards and forwards. Words like "madam", "Hannah" and "racecar" are all examples of palindromes. That was too easy for us though! We decided to write poems that could be read both forwards and backwards. You can read some of them on our class writing blog.

Spelling can be tricky. There are many sounds in the English language that can be spelled in different ways. Today, we looked at the /ch/ sound and discovered that it can be written in two main ways - "ch" and "tch". After brainstorming lots of words with the /ch/ sound, we discovered that we couldn't think of any that began with "tch". Mrs N couldn't think of any either! All the words we came up with used "tch" in the middle or at the end of the word. However, there were many, many words that begin with the "ch" spelling. We decided that when we need to spell a word starting with /ch/ it's probably going to be spelled with a "ch".

For Monday Munchies yesterday, we tried Carambola. It's sometimes called starfruit because when you slice it, it looks like a five-pointed star. We thought it was pretty delicious. Three people didn't really like it, but everyone else wanted seconds!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

A Day of Dancing

2011-04-01T21:22:00.005+08:00

This morning, our class had our assembly in front of the whole school. We sang and danced to a song called Gotta Keep Reading and we were fantastic! Many of the teachers told Mrs N how impressed they were that we learned all the words so well and that we sang loud enough for everyone to hear us. It was really great!

We also revealed our version of The Gingerbread Man. In our version, The Gingerbread Man met some of our teachers and avoided being eaten!

This evening, our school had a disco. Mrs N went along to have a dance with us and she took some photos. Our school is awesome and we're lucky to have so many friends to share the fun with!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Our Assembly Slideshow

2011-03-31T15:57:00.001+08:00

Tomorrow morning, we have our assembly. We'll be performing a song and dance in front of the whole school and we can't wait. The theme of our assembly is "reading", so we've taken lots of photos of us enjoying books and made them into a slideshow to play in the background during our song.

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Kathy the Entomologist

2011-03-30T16:20:00.007+08:00

Kathy showing us some butterfly specimens

When we want to learn about something, there are many things we can do. We can ask our teacher and parents, to see if they know, we can check in books, we can search online, or we can find someone who is an expert on the topic and ask them. That's what we did today!

We had a Skype session with Kathy, who's an entomologist in Queensland. She knows lots and lots about insects. She taught us all sorts of amazing things and answered a lot of questions that we had. Kathy showed us her pet stick insect, who lives on a gum tree branch in her office and she also showed us some specimens of lots of other insects too.

Some of the things we learned are:

all insects have 6 legs when they're adults
baby ladybirds are tiny red and black lavae that might be mistaken for caterpillars
all spiders have some venom because they use it to break down food to make it easier for them to eat
there is a butterfly that looks exactly like a leaf
there is a beetle in Africa that is as big as your hand
some butterflies are poisonous when they're eaten by birds and other animals
butterflies have a long curly mouthpart and they use it to suck nectar from flowers to eat
ants are very organised and have separate rooms in their ant nests for different jobs (eg. a room to store food, one for the queen to lay her eggs, one for the larvae to live in and one for rubbish and waste to be kept in)
bees, wasps and ants bite or sting because they're trying to protect their homes
grasshoppers have special muscles in their legs to help them hop
some insects only live for a day, while others can live for years
only female mosquitoes bite and they need blood to feed the eggs that are inside their bodies
slaters curl into balls so they can protect themselves from predators
some insects are red because it's a "danger!" colour and warns predators that it wouldn't be a good idea to eat them

We really enjoyed our chat with Kathy. She was really, really nice and was very happy to answer anything we asked. We made her thankyou cards this afternoon, with special drawings of insects on the front.

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Fruit from a Cactus?

2011-03-28T18:31:00.000+08:00

A Dragonfruit Tree (photo by C. Sookdhis)

Have you ever eaten fruit from a cactus? We have! We tried it today during Monday Munchies and it was called dragonfruit, or pitaya. It originated in South America, but is also grown in many Asian countries. The outside is a beautiful pink colour and the inside is white, with many tiny black seeds. About half the class liked it and the other half didn't, but Mrs N was very happy that we all tried something that looked very strange to us.

Paige brought a book to school today about cystic fibrosis (CF). It's a story about a dog called Monty, whose owner has CF. It really helped us to understand some of the treatments that Paige experiences and helped us to understand her condition more. Thanks for sharing it with us Paige!

Venn diagrams can be used to compare information about two things. It's a simple way to organise similarities and differences. We used one to compare moths with butterflies. At first, we thought it was quite hard to tell the difference, because they look so similar, but after completing our diagram, we discovered some things that made it easy to tell them apart. We decided that checking whether it was day or night and whether the wings were up or resting flat, were the easiest ways.

What a busy week we have! We've been very busy practising for our assembly, which is this Friday! On Wednesday, we're going to be Skyping with an entomologist (an insect expert), so we spent some time today, planning some questions to ask her.

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

A Colourful Creation

2011-03-23T17:05:00.002+08:00

We created a beautiful colour mural today. We learned to draw portraits and paid particular attention to the shape of our eyes, noses and mouths. The trick was that we needed to use only one colour for each drawing! This is called mono-chromatic drawing. We could use pencil, crayon or texta to make our pictures and each person was assigned a colour to use. We did two each, but some of us did three or four because we finished quickly. For some of the drawings, we actually used two colours so they could go in between the groups of just one colour. When they were all done, we stuck them all together and hung them outside our classroom. We have had lots of compliments about our artwork already!

In Maths, we practised addition. We're becoming superstars at it now and know lots and lots of number facts in our heads. This makes it much easier to do trickier sums.

This afternoon, we created a Voki to add to our blog. When we visited the 2MK blog, we saw they had one and wanted to make one for ourselves! We thought of a message that would welcome people and asked them to leave us a comment. We recorded our voices and uploaded it so that it looks like the koala is talking! It was lots of fun picking out the character we wanted to use. You can listen to it by clicking the play button underneath the koala.

The best part of the day was when we got to eat the gingerbread house that Julie's mum made for us. It was delicious!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Prickly Pineapples!

2011-03-21T19:50:00.000+08:00

It's Monday, which means it's Monday Munchies day! Today's healthy food was fresh pineapple. Many of us had tried sliced pineapple from a tin, but having fresh pineapple was a treat. We learned that they grow in warm places and they were named pineapples because their skin resembles a pine cone. We thought it was really delicious and we especially liked that it was so sweet and juicy.

We were excited this morning when Julie arrived at school. Her mum had made us an amazing gingerbread house! She knew that we have been reading various versions of The Gingerbread Man and that we made our own gingerbread men last week. She thought we'd like a house to match! We can't wait to start nibbling on it.

Thankyou Julie's mum!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Butterfly Life Cycle

2011-03-17T16:35:00.000+08:00

We watched this video to learn about the life cycle of a butterfly. We learned that:

butterflies lay their eggs on leaves
after a while, the egg hatches and a very small caterpillar comes out
the caterpillar nibbles on their egg for nutrients
the caterpillar spends all day eating, eating, then eating some more
they like to eat leaves
as it grows, it grows new skin and sheds the old one
eventually, when it is big and plump, it sheds its skin for a final time and surrounds itself with a chrysalis
it is called a pupa while it's in the chrysalis
the pupa turns into a butterfly
the process is called metamorphisis
the butterfly hatches out of the chrysalis and pumps fluid into its wings
the butterfly flies away and feeds on nectar
eventually, it will lay eggs of its own

We were amazed at the complete change that happened in the pupal stage. Where did all the legs go? How did the body change shape so completely? Where did the wings come from? How did it grow and change while it was so squished up in the chrysalis?

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Gingerbread Goodies

2011-03-16T20:04:00.001+08:00

Brydie, Paige and Tieg with different versions of the story

We LOVE the story of the Gingerbread Man! We've been reading different re-tellings of it and have even been writing a class version. Today, we baked our very own gingerbread men, with the help of Mrs B and Danica's Nanny. We did lots of mixing and rolling and cutting out. We put them in the oven and kept a close eye on them when we were taking them out, just to make sure they didn't run away! When they were cool, we decorated them with icing, Smarties and mini M & Ms. They looked so adorable and they tasted delicious too!

Tomorrow is St Patrick's Day, which is a big holiday in Ireland. Many Australians are descended from the Irish and Aodhán is half Irish, so to celebrate, we made some shamrock crowns. We traced around some cardboard templates, twisted some sparkly green pipecleaners and attached them to a strip of green card. They look great and we'll be wearing them all day tomorrow. Thankyou to Elise's mum who helped us make them.

We've been practising counting by 5s. We made slithering snakes so we could practise writing our numbers. We needed to count by fives, write the numbers on the snake, then colour it in with a pattern. Renee's aunty helped us out!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Crazy Craisins!

2011-03-14T17:41:00.003+08:00

Mrs N was away from school because she was sick last week, which is why we didn't have any blog entries. We were super-good for our relief teachers, Mrs L and Mrs M, so that made Mrs N feel much better!

Our Monday Munchies food today was dried cranberries, which are sometimes called "craisins". They're a healthy food if you eat them in small amounts, because even though they have lots of vitamin C, there is some sugar added to them when they're being dried. They're a great healthy treat, rather than something we should be eating every day. We learned that they can be dried by being out in the sun, or by machines. Most of us enjoyed eating craisins because they were juicy, sweet and tasted just like cranberry juice!

We've been doing lots of work learning about healthy foods. We know that healthy foods give our bodies the things we need to be strong and active and for our bodies to grow. We had to think about the types of foods that we could have for dinner that would be good for us. We drew all of those healthy foods and glued them onto a paper plate, along with drawings of a healthy dessert, a drink and cutlery, which we made with silver paper. We put them on a piece of cardboard to make it look like a placemat. You can read some of the descriptions of our meals on our writing blog. We're going to ask our mums and dads if we can help them make our healthy meal at home one night!

Mrs N received an email from our Italian penpals. They received our letters and they're busy writing back to us. Hopefully, we'll be hearing from them soon!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

A Trip Around the World

2011-03-04T18:15:00.002+08:00

This morning, we spent some time looking at classroom blogs from around the world. We saw videos of children playing in snow in Canada, we were amazed at the writing on a blog in Israel, heard a report about monkeys from Russia, watched a video made by children in New Zealand, looked at photos of children from Poland, watched a slideshow about Valentine's Day bags in America and finally, looked at projects from South Africa. Our school theme this year is HARMONY and being able to see and read about children in other countries really helps us to understand how alike we all are, as well as to appreciate our differences.

A few weeks ago, we all wrote descriptions and posted photos of our lunches. We are collaborating with a class in Malaysia so that we can learn about what the children there like to eat for lunch. They have posted some photos on their teacher's blog. The picture on the left is of Afrina and she likes to eat sardine sandwiches. You can see the rest of the photos on their blog.

Jenaya had some exciting news to tell us today. Her mum is having a baby and she'll have a new baby brother soon! She brought in a DVD and some pictures of the ultrasound her mum had recently. We got to see the baby in her mum's tummy and it was exciting to see his little face and arms!

On Sunday, it's Clean Up Australia Day. This afternoon, we spent time cleaning up our school. We wore gloves and weren't allowed to pick up anything that looked like it could hurt us. We made a list of the things we found:

glass bottles
paper
chip wrappers
lolly wrappers
cigarette butts
metal
cans
a car tyre

Some of those things weren't put there by anyone at the school. They might have been thrown over fences onto school property, or blown by the wind from somewhere else. However, there were some things that students had probably left. We each made a commitment to do our best to pick up our rubbish, as well as any rubbish we see laying around, even though it isn't ours. We want our school to stay as clean as it is now!

There is no school until Wednesday! Monday is a public holiday for Labour Day and then on Tuesday, kids stay home because the teachers are having some meetings. We get 4 whole days to relax and have fun at home!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Leaping Lizards!

2011-03-03T18:51:00.002+08:00

Sharni found a baby lizard at her house and brought it in to show us. We aren't sure what sort it is, but it has a long curly tail and was sitting happily on a stick in the little habitat she'd made for it! Sharni will let it go when she gets home, so that it can go off and do lizard-type things, like finding delicious insects to eat! Sharni's dad also came in to help out in class. He helped us with writing and with Maths and it was great having him there!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Butterfly Creations

2011-03-02T17:16:00.001+08:00

We finished our butterfly pictures today and we think they look amazing! They've been worked on in stages over the last few weeks and we're happy to finally have them on display in our classroom. Elise's mum helped us finish them.

For the backgrounds, we painted stripes with watercolours, trying to keep the colours soft by using lots of water on our brushes. We traced the butterflies using templates in the shape of half butterflies, then flipped them over to make them symmetrical. We used oil pastels to outline them, then painted with watercolour. This time, we tried to make the colours darker and brighter by using less water on our brushes. We folded the wings up so it looks like they're flying and glued them wherever we wanted onto the background. It was great fun and we love the bright colours!

We used the laptops this morning and practised our maths at Tutpup. Danica's mum helped us with logging in and making sure everything was working properly.

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Schoolyard Safari

2011-03-01T17:33:00.002+08:00

We grabbed clipboards, pencils, paper and hats and went on a schoolyard safari today! Our task was to find minibeasts to observe.

First, we decided on some rules to keep ourselves safe and to care for the little creatures we found. Our rules were:

Don't touch any animals we find, just in case they can bite or sting us, and so that we don't do them any harm.
Put things back exactly how you found them (eg. if we move a rock to look underneath, put it back carefully, because it's a habitat and it was just the way the insects liked it before we took a look.)
Wash our hands after we're finished because our hands might be dirty from touching sand, bark and rocks.

A few days ago, we predicted what sort of minibeasts we might find at school and made a big list of them. Today, we put a tick beside the ones we actually found. Some of them were interesting because even though we didn't find them today, we're pretty sure they're somewhere at our school, but they might be hard to spot because they're so good at camouflaging themselves.

mosquito ✔
stinkbug ✔
ladybird ✔
butterfly
praying mantis
grasshopper ✔
fly ✔
spider ✔
bee ✔
snail
centipede
dragonfly ✔
hornet
caterpillar
ant ✔
worm ✔
moth
wasp ✔
slug
beetle ✔
stick insect ✔
scorpion
slater ✔
cicada

Mrs N appreciated having Renee's mum to help us on our safari this morning!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

The Gingerbread Man

2011-02-28T18:15:00.001+08:00

We read another version of The Gingerbread Man today. Mrs N explained that it's a very old story that has been retold many times and it was first published in 1875, which is 136 years ago! The version we read today was by Jim Aylesworth. It was a little different to the story we read online last week. The Gingerbread Man was still chased by a little old woman, a cow and a pig, but he never tried to cross a river. The fox took him by surprise and ate him up, instead of tricking him as he crossed the river.

We're starting to learn about writing narratives. We learned that a narrative is a made-up story and is usually written to entertain us. The Gingerbread Man is a narrative and we've decided to write our own version of the story, but it's going to be set in our school. We wrote the opening paragraph of it today. It's going to be fun!

Our Monday Munchies food today was snow pea shoots and we LOVED them! Every single person in the class thought they were delicious and would definitely like to eat them again.

Some of the words we came up with to describe snow pea shoots were:

delicious
crunchy
green
fantastic
outstanding
healthy
nutritious
leafy

We'll be asking our mums and dads to get us some so we can put them in our sandwiches, add them to salads, or just eat them on their own!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

A New Baby Brother!

2011-02-25T19:40:00.003+08:00

Aodhán is a big brother! His mum had a baby last week and she brought him in for us to meet today. We thought he was soooooo cute! His name is Eiméad. Aodhán's parents chose celtic names for their children, as they're from the UK. The little line over the letters in their names is called a fada and you type it by holding alt, then typing 0225 for á and alt 0233 for the é. (Mrs N just learned that today!)

Congratulations to Aodhán and his family on the new arrival!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Parent Helpers

2011-02-23T21:01:00.004+08:00

We were really lucky this morning because we had THREE parent helpers in our classroom! Danica's dad, Elise's mum and Renee's Aunty all came to help us. Instead of our usual reading groups, Mrs N decided to put our helpers to work and gave them each a hands-on group activity to supervise. We split up into groups and tried out each one.

The first activity was to find the letters that spell out our spelling words and then glue them into our scrapbooks. Danica's dad helped us with that. It made a big mess, but it was pretty fun!

The next task was supervised by Renee's aunty and we needed to find pictures of people, places and things for our noun posters. We've been learning all about nouns this week. Nouns are names of people, places or things. Anything we can see, is going to be a noun and if you can put the word "the" or "a" in front of a word, it's probably a noun too. We wrote the nouns on little stickers and stuck them next to each picture we found.

The other activity was painting with watercolour paints. We used watercolours to make our deskmats a few weeks ago, but Mrs N thought we needed to practice using more water on our brushes. Our task today was to paint stripes onto a piece of paper, making sure we used enough water to make the colours light. This will be the background for our current art project. Elise's mum is great at art, so she helped us with our painting.

Mrs N didn't get to sit around with her feet up while the parent helpers were hard at work. She had an activity to supervise too! Elise's mum is very interested in insects, so she brought some in that she found in her garden. They were all dead, which meant that we could get up really close and have a good look at them. We could even touch them, if we were very gentle. Our task in Mrs N's group was to identify the parts of insect bodies and draw them. We discovered that insects have three main body parts - a head, a thorax and an abdomen. They also have eyes, 6 legs, wings, mouth parts for eating and antennae.

Thankyou to our parent helpers today (and also to Cathy's mum who came in last week to help). Lots of parent help means we get to do some extra great learning! (Plus, we love showing off how clever we are!)

We received a blog comment from Tanzania yesterday! Tanzania is in Africa and we thought it was pretty cool that people so far away like to read our blog. Their blog is called IST Grade 2 and they mentioned us in one of their blog posts. Mrs N and their teacher, Mr McKillip are going to organise a project for us to do together some time.

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Uno, Due, Tre!

2011-02-22T17:40:00.002+08:00

Our Italian teacher, Signora L showed us a song we can sing to practise counting in Italian. It even includes counting backwards!

Here's how you write those numbers:

1 - uno

2 - due

3 - tre

4 - quattro

5 - cinque

6 - sei

7 - sette

8 - otto

9 - nove

10 - dieci

We love learning Italian!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

An Action-Packed Day!

2011-02-21T19:45:00.001+08:00

Jenaya, Mitchell and Makayla using the reading phones

Well it's now the fourth week of school and we're really in the swing of things. Mrs N has listened to us all reading and worked out what we need to learn and practice. We have reading groups called Lions, Tigers, Pandas and Unicorns and we each spend time with Mrs N during the literacy block. She helps us learn new words, improve our fluency (how smoothly we read) and teaches us ways we can work out words we don't know. While she's working with one of the groups, all the other groups are practising their reading on their own. We do things like independent reading, reading with a friend and reading the words that are all around our classroom. Being good readers helps us with all the other subjects we do at school, even Maths!

Jacinta, Renee & Jayden with their writing

One of the Smarties is in hospital for the next two weeks. Paige has cystic fibrosis, so she needs to go and have treatment sometimes. We missed her at school today, but she emailed us, which was very exciting! She told us about how she needs to have needles and physiotherapy. She doesn't like those things, but she loves the delicious food, the arts and crafts and being able to lay around in bed! She thinks it's pretty fun to stay in hospital.

We decided to write back to Paige, so we got into groups of three and shared the job of writing. We each had a different coloured texta and took turns to write the words. We needed to work together to decide what we wanted our sentences and questions to say, then we wrote them out, helping each other with spelling and with remembering capital letters, fullstops and question marks. Mrs N has typed up all of our letters and emailed them to Paige to read. Hopefully, it'll make her happy!

Mrs N loves the story of The Gingerbread Man! We read it online today and thought it was great! We're going to be doing some more activities about the story in the next few weeks. Today, after we read it, we were each given a picture of a gingerbread man. Mrs N then read out some instructions and we needed to listen very carefully and do what she asked. There were things like "If you're a girl, colour his buttons pink, but if you're a boy, colour his buttons blue". Everyone's gingerbread man turned out differently!

After doing so much already today, it was finally time for Monday Munchies! Our healthy food this week was rockmelon. We learned that rockmelon:

is called canteloupe in some places
was originally grown in Italy
has a hard, rough skin that you don't eat
has lots of seeds inside that you don't eat
is a great source of vitamins A and C
is very juicy!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Yummy, Yummy!

2011-02-21T19:10:00.000+08:00

Last week, we learned about writing descriptions and as part of that, we described our lunches and took photos of them. There is a class in Malaysia who is doing the same thing, so we can learn about what children in another country like to eat and how it is different and the same to ours. Finally, Mrs N has put all our writing together so we could post it on our blog. Now we just need to wait until our Malaysian friends get a chance to post theirs.

We hope you like our writing and photos!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

What's For Lunch?

2011-02-16T22:41:00.000+08:00

What's for lunch today?

Today, we started a new lunch project with a class in Malaysia. We took photos of our lunches and wrote descriptions of them. We'll be posting them on our blog in the next few days for our new friends in Malaysia to see and read. They'll be doing the same soon too! It will be really interesting to find out what children there like to eat.

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

The Tooth Fairy

2011-02-15T16:57:00.001+08:00

Mrs N and the Tooth Fairy are great friends and they had lunch together on the weekend. We wanted to know what she looked like, but Mrs N didn't have any photos of her, so we looked online and found a description of her instead.

The Tooth Fairy has long, black hair that blows in the wind. She is smiling. She wears a long, pink dress with yellow stars on it and green slippers. She carries a black purse to keep the teeth in. She has two wings that look like butterfly wings. They are yellow, pink and green. Her wand has a green handle and a star at the end. It sparkles to help her see in the dark.

After we read the description together, we went back and looked for words that would help us draw a picture of the Tooth Fairy. The types of words we were looking for were nouns and adjectives. The nouns told us what we needed to include in our picture and the adjectives told us what they looked like. It made our drawings very easy to do!

As we were so good at reading a description to work out what something looks like, Mrs N showed us a picture of her lunch and asked us to write our own descriptions. We needed to think about the nouns and adjectives we could use to make our writing very clear. You can read some of them on our writing blog. Tomorrow, we'll be writing descriptions of our own lunches because we have a special project happening!

Our letters to our new Italian penpals are almost done! You can read some of them on our writing blog. At our school, everyone has an Italian lesson each week with Signora L and she teaches us about Italy and about the language they speak there. We wrote two sentences in Italian in our letters, as well as saying hello and goodbye.

Ciao! (Hello, or goodbye!)

Io mi chiamo Jessica. (My name is Jessica.)

Io ho sei anni. (I am six years old.)

Io ho sette anni. (I am seven years old).

This was our first try at writing letters. We learned about including an address, a date and a greeting. In the first part of our letter, we wrote a little bit about ourselves and in the second part, we asked our new friends some questions. We'll be posting our letters tomorrow and it will be very exciting waiting for the replies!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Avocado

2011-02-14T17:00:00.002+08:00

It's Monday, which means Monday Munchies! This week, our healthy food was avocado. We looked at a fact sheet about them and learned some interesting things:

They originally came from Mexico.
They are one of the only fruits to contain fat, but it's a healthy type that helps to keep us healthy.
They are rich in vitamins.
Some people like to spread avocado on bread, instead of using butter.
They grow on trees.
There are different varieties and the one we tried is called Hass.

The outside of the avocado was rough and hard, but inside it was soft and smooth. There was a very large seed in there too!

Unfortunately, most of us didn't like avocados very much. There were only four of us who thought they tasted yummy. Mrs N didn't like them when she was younger either, but now that she's a grown-up, she eats them. Sometimes, our tastes change as we get older, so even though we don't like them now, we'll try them again when we're bigger. The important thing is to keep trying new, healthy foods so that we can grow up strong and healthy.


Sharni gives avocado a thumbs up!

We've been working on letters to our new pen pals. They live in Lecce, Italy, which is marked on the map below. If you look at a map of Italy, you'll see it looks a bit like a boot. Our new friends live in the heel part! We'll be putting some of our letters on our writing blog tomorrow.

View Larger Map

We did some more activities about symmetry today and we searched our classroom for objects that are symmetrical. Mrs N made them into a quiz using Quiz Revolution. Be careful! There are some pictures of things that are not symmetrical in there too. Don't be tricked!

<p>&amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://www.mystudiyo.com/act135800/mini/go/symmetry"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;symmetry&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;am</p>

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Symmetry

2011-02-13T16:02:00.000+08:00

We're learning about symmetry at the moment. We know that symmetrical shapes have a line of symmetry. This is an imaginary line that divides an object exactly in half and if you could fold the object on this line, each side would match exactly.

For example, these are all symmetrical shapes. The dotted lines are the lines of symmetry.

We used symmetry for our art project this week. After colouring in some shapes, we cut them along the line of symmetry and made a picture.

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Laptop Fun

2011-02-09T19:40:00.007+08:00

We had our first session with the laptops today and learned how to use Tux Paint. It was so much fun and we learned a lot about the programme. We worked in pairs and spent a lot of time exploring all the different tools and buttons we could use.

We learned:

there are different backgrounds we can choose and some are plain colours and some have scenes, like the beach
how to erase parts of our picture, or undo the last few things we did
how to change the size of things
how to make lines of arrows, stars and bricks
that there are pictures of animals, trucks, the sun and other objects we can add
how to save our work

Mrs N asked us to make a picture of ourselves. Here are some of them!

Taj, building a bug

This morning, we also took turns using the Smartboard to Build-a-Bug! We chose various insect and spider parts and created our own special bug. Mrs N said she's glad our bugs aren't real, because they looked pretty scary!

We've started using Tutpup for addition practice, because Mrs N wants us to become superstars at adding in our heads. On Tutpup, we have our own special login name and we get to have Maths races against children from other parts of the world. Today, some of us played against China, New Zealand and India. The more we practise, the better we'll get!

This afternoon, we went on a word hunt. We were each given three words on separate pieces of paper and we needed to find a set of three words that rhymed with each other. We had to ask the other Smarties if they had words that we needed. When we all had our three words, we glued them together (they fitted together like a jigsaw) in our scrapbooks and wrote as many other words as we could that rhymed with our set of words.

We discovered that sometimes words can sound similar, even though they are spelled very differently. For example, the words eight, wait and gate rhyme, and so do blue, you and zoo. Look how differently they're spelled!

There are also some words that look like they should rhyme because they have the same spelling pattern, but they don't when you read them aloud. For example, are and stare don't rhyme and neither do fear and wear.

On the hunt for rhyming words!

There is lots to learn in Year 2!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Monday Munchies

2011-02-07T18:04:00.004+08:00

In our class, every Monday is "Monday Munchies". Mrs N will be bringing in a food each week for us to try. She's hoping that we'll discover some healthy, new foods for our lunchboxes, or to eat at home.

Today, many of us DID discover a new food we liked. It's called broccolini and it's like broccoli, but has smaller stems. It's a great source of Vitamin C, which is important for keeping us healthy. Mrs N was very proud of us because everyone tried it, even if we thought we might not like it.

Some of the adjectives (describing words) we thought of to describe broccolini include: green, smelly, outstanding, delicious, nutritious, healthy and firm.

We also learned a new song about fruit and vegetables. It's from KidsSoup.

FRUIT AND VEG SONG

(to the tune of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star)

Apples, pears and oranges too,

fruits are sweet for me and you.

Carrots, peas and broccoli,

vegetables are good for me.

Fruits and vegetables are good for you.

They keep you healthy and are yummy too!

Vertumnus by Guiseppe Arcimboldo

To decorate the front of our "Monday Munchies" scrapbook, we were inspired by the art of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, who was an Italian artist who liked to create portraits using fruits and vegetables. Aren't our fruity faces cute?

This morning, we checked out the comments people have left on our blog and we were super-excited to see that not only did some of our mums, dads and grandparents leave messages, but we also got some from Canada and Russia! Thankyou to everyone who has taken the time to comment. We check them every morning in class.

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

New Things

2011-02-04T23:54:00.003+08:00

This week, we've been writing about something we did in the holidays. Mrs N has taught us about a new type of text, called a "recount". This is when we retell an event, or series of events that has happened in the past. There are three main parts of a recount:

Introduction - we need to explain who, when, where and possibly why the event occurred.
Events - we describe the parts of the events in the order they occurred.
Conclusion - we write a closing statement to bring a close to our recount.

We used a recount planning sheet to work out what we wanted to say, then we wrote a draft and finally, we made good copies. They'll be going on display in our classroom, but some have been added to our writing blog. It would be great if you could read them and let us know what you think of our first attempt at writing recounts! Mrs N is especially proud of the way we used interesting sentence beginnings.

Today, we also tried a new type of art. We used watercolour paints for the first time. They are little circles of dried paint in containers and we needed to wet a brush really well and rub it on the colour we wanted. It colours the water on our brush and we can use it to paint on paper. On Tuesday, we ruled up a grid and wrote the upper case alphabet, one letter in each box (except for I, which shared a box with J). Today, we painted the boxes different colours and we'll be laminating them and using them as desk mats. We discovered that when you use only a little bit of water, the colour is dark, but when we use a lot, the colour is much lighter. We thought it was great fun!

Paige and Mitchell

Grade 2 is going great so far, but we all need to have a good rest on the weekend, so that we can get back to learning new things next week!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

The New Smarties are Here!

2011-02-03T17:52:00.000+08:00

The new Smarties have started school! We have had a super-busy two days showing Mrs N all the things we can do. She thinks we're fantastic and SO well behaved!

We're so busy that we don't have time to add anything to this post, except a couple of pictures of us hard at work. (We're very good-looking, don't you think?) We'll be posting a lot more next week when Mrs N has more time!

Jayden and Stephany

Danica and Jenaya

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

School's Out for Summer!

2010-12-17T01:02:00.003+08:00

The Smarties in our "reduce, reuse, recycle" concert costumes.

Well, our time in Year 2 is officially over. Summer holidays have started and before long we'll be in Year 3.

It's been an exciting week, with our school concert, a trip to the movies and getting all our things packed up and taken home.

We were FANTASTIC at the concert and sang our song really well. For our costumes, we wore reusable shopping bags and made recycling symbol crowns. We were a little nervous once we got up on stage and saw the hundreds of people there, but we managed to sing loudly and do all the actions perfectly. As part of the concert, some of us were presented with awards for our hard work this year. Mrs N is so proud of all of us and wished she had 24 awards to give out, but she and Mrs M had to choose just 3 people.

Academic Award - Indi

Achievement Award - Minnesota

Religious Education Award - Noah

Our new teacher, Miss S, has a blog which can be found here, and Mrs N will be continuing this one with her new class. Check back in February to see what we're up to!

Merry Christmas! See you next year!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Merry Christmas Smarties!

2010-12-10T20:29:00.002+08:00

Dear Smarties,

I made you some Christmas videos. I've embedded one of them, but to see the others, click on the links underneath. I hope they make you giggle!

Personalize funny videos and birthday eCards at JibJab!

Love from Mrs N

7 Days to Go!

2010-12-07T18:48:00.005+08:00

Wow, what a busy time we've been having! There is so much going on at school at the moment, we're being very busy bees. Mrs N and Mrs M have also been concentrating on writing our end-of-year reports (we're being extra good so they think of lots of nice things to say about us!).

We've been practising for our end-of-year concert, which is next Wednesday. The theme is "respect", so we chose a song about respecting the environment. It's Jack Johnson's The 3Rs. It's a really great song and we love singing it!

Jack, Joshua and Jake re-using our have-a-go pads

As The Smarties are so interested in reducing, reusing and recycling, our art activity today involved reusing something we would have thrown away! We use have-a-go pads when we want to try to see if we can spell a word before we put it in our writing. We have-a-go at writing it down twice and then we take it to one of our teachers for them to check and show us how to spell the word correctly. We were going to throw those books away because it's the end of the year, but we decided to use them for a painting project instead.

First, we took the staples out of the pads, so we had loose pieces of paper. We painted them on one side with poster paints and let them dry. We also painted a larger sheet of art paper blue. Later, we cut up the smaller, coloured pieces to make a collage. If you look closely, you might be able to see some of our tries at spelling underneath the paint!

With Christmas coming up, our school is collecting non-perishable food to give to a charity for Christmas. Non-perishables are foods such as potato chips, biscuits, canned fruit and vegetables, rice and pasta that will last a while, without being in the fridge. We have an empty box in our classroom, which we're hoping to fill by the end of the week!

Our empty box, ready to be filled with goodies!

We can't believe that it's almost time for the holidays and the end of Grade 2!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

What Gorgeous Babies!

2010-11-30T19:00:00.001+08:00

Yesterday, we had a "guess-the-baby" competition! We each brought in a photo of us when we were a baby (even Mrs N and Mrs M brought one in) and we needed to guess who was who. Some of them were easy, because our faces hadn't changed very much, but some of them were very tricky because we don't look like we used to at all!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Oobleck

2010-11-29T22:41:00.002+08:00

We made oobleck today. You make it by mixing cornflour and water until you get a paste. It's very weird because it does some things you don't usually expect a paste to do. This is what we observed:

When you push on it fast, it's hard.
When you push on it slowly, it's soft.
It can drip off a spoon just like honey.
You can form it into shapes like cubes and spheres.
It goes crumbly if you keep rolling it between your hands.

We discovered that when you apply pressure to oobleck, it acts like a solid and when there is no pressure, it acts more like a liquid. We found it very interesting!

We finally finished our art activity from last week. We had painted two pieces of paper with brightly coloured circles. Then, we ruled lines on the back, cut them into strips and threaded them together. Don't they look amazing!?

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Let's be Sun Smart!

2010-11-23T20:32:00.002+08:00

We have been discussing the idea of being "sun smart". This means that we are smart when we're in the sun! It gets very hot where we live and the sun can be very strong. It's almost Summer so we need to start thinking about how we can keep our bodies safe, but still enjoy being in the sunshine.

We wrote persuasive texts about the question "Should we be Sun Smart?" Mrs N is trying out a new way to publish stories, called Simple Booklet.

We did some painting this afternoon. There were lots of beautiful colours to choose from and we had to cover two sheets of paper, using circle patterns. We'll be making them into something special on Thursday!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

I Wanna Iguana!

2010-11-18T18:27:00.001+08:00

We're learning about persuasive writing, or expositions. This is when we try to persuade someone to do, or agree to something. We watched a video of a book called I Wanna Iguana by Karen Kaufman Orloff, which is about a boy called Alex, who really, really wants a pet iguana. He writes notes to his mum, trying to persuade her to agree.

Here are the arguments Alex used in the story to try to convince his mum to let him have the iguana his friend was giving away:

It might get eaten by Stinky's dog if we don't take him.
It's quiet and cute.
Its cage would stay in my room so you wouldn't even notice it's there.
By the time it gets too big, I would have moved out anyway.
I need a new friend.
I could teach it tricks.
I'd feed it every day.
I'd make sure it had enough water.
I'd clean its cage.
I'll pay for its food.

He did such a great job persuading his mum that she finally agreed to let him have it! We decided to write to our parents to see if they'd let us have a new pet.

Dear Mum,

I would really like a horse.

I would pay for its food.

I would clean its water every day.

I would clean its stable when it's done a poop.

It would give me exercise.

I hope you get me a horse, please.

Love Charlee

Dear Mum and Dad,

I really want a puppy as a pet.

I would buy it dog food with my pocket money.

I would train it two times a day.

I would take it for walks every day in the afternoons.

I would play with it and buy it some toys.

I think it would be a great pet.
Love Allia

Dear Mum,

I really want a shark.

I would buy it toys with my pocket money.

I would keep it in my room and you would not see it.

I would keep it healthy by giving it the right food.

I would keep the door shut.

I really want a shark.

Love Matthew

Earlier in the week, we started making paper mosaics in the shape of Christmas stockings. Most of us finished them today. We needed a lot of patience, especially as our little squares of paper were blowing around in the air-conditioning (it was way too hot to turn it off!).

Alex, Indi and Lachlan with their mosaic Christmas stockings

This term in Sport, we've been going to the local recreation centre to have gymnastics lessons. We do lots of running, jumping, hopping and skipping and it's great!

On Tuesday for news, Kiara brought in some photos of her as a baby. She was really cute! We decided it would be fun and interesting to see what all of The Smarties looked like when we were little, so we're having a Guess-the-Baby competition! We each need to bring in a photo of us when we were babies and give it to Mrs N. It's important that we don't show anyone else, or tell anybody about our photos, otherwise they'll know which is ours when it comes time to guess. Next week, Mrs N will put all the photos up and we're going to fill out a form to guess who-is-who. It's going to be so much fun!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

25,000 Hits!

2010-11-16T16:06:00.001+08:00

The Smarties have reached another milestone. Our blog has had 25,000 hits since February this year! We're amazed and excited! Thankyou to everyone who reads our blog. We've learned a lot from the friends we've made around the world and we find it very useful to check back to see activities we've done, or things we've learned in the past as revision. Hopefully, we'll continue to blog with our Year 3 teacher next year!

We did some more practice with similes today. On strips of paper, we wrote some similes then cut them up so one part was the "as (something) as" part and the other piece was the answer. We put the first parts out on the desks, then we were given some of the second parts. We walked around the room, reading each of the similes to see if the part we had matched. We needed to make sure they made sense. Things like "as green as a clown", or "as brown as the sky" were silly, so we had to keep looking until we found the right one.

In Art this afternoon, we started making paper mosaics. We were given the outline of a Christmas stocking and some strips of coloured card. We needed to cut the strips into little squares and glue them onto the shape, leaving just a little gap in between each piece. It's a bit like the tiles in bathrooms and kitchens. We didn't have time to finish them, so we'll do them again on Thursday and they're going to look great!

Also, thankyou to Alex's mum who came to help us in our classroom this morning!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

2010-11-15T17:08:00.001+08:00

Our end-of-year concert is coming up, so we've been practising the song we'll be singing. It's called The 3 Rs, by Jack Johnson and it's all about reducing, reusing and recycling. Some of it's tricky to sing, but we're learning fast!

Today, we learned about similes. A simile is a figure of speech that explains how one thing is like another. We can use them to make our writing more interesting and to paint a mind-picture for the reader. They can help to explain things that are difficult to describe. We thought of lots of examples:

A tall as a giraffe
As soft as a pillow
As hard as concrete
As strong as my dad
As green as grass
As pretty as my mum
As cold as snow
As light as a butterfly

We chose our four favourite similes and made posters.

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Remembrance Day

2010-11-12T09:22:00.005+08:00

Yesterday was Remembrance Day. At 11 o'clock, the whole school participated in a prayer service. Many of the children and teachers were wearing poppies, which have a special meaning. We made some in class and learned about some of the things we do on Remembrance Day and why we have it.

Remembrance Day - At 11am on the 11th day of the the 11th month, in 1918, the First World War ended. We now call this Remembrance Day as a way to remind us about how awful war is and how we should try to live peacefully so that people don't have to live through war again.

Poppies - We wear poppies as a sign of respect. The significance of poppies comes from a poem written by an army doctor called John McCrae, in 1915, called In Flanders' Field. His hospital was close to a field where they had been burying the soldiers who had died. Many poppies were growing between the graves, so he wrote a poem that starts like this:

In Flanders’ Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row

One Minute Silence - During the service, we have one minute silence. During this time, everyone thinks about the meaning of the day and about the people who have been killed or injured in wars.

Last Post -This is a tune played on a bugle at the start of the one minute silence. It was traditionally played at the end of the work day for soldiers, but now it's played at war memorial services to symbolise the end of the soldiers' duties.

The Flag - At the beginning of our prayer service, the Australian flag was at half-mast. This means that it was only half way up, which is a sign of respect or mourning. At the end of the service, it was raised to the top.

The Ode - The Ode is a special poem we say on Remembrance Day, as well as other days when we remember wars. It's from a longer poem, called For the Fallen, by Laurence Binyon. It is about how the soldiers who have died will never get older, like we will.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

In the afternoon, we chose some of the things we'd been learning about during the day and made them into Remembrance Day posters.

Indi with her Remembrance Day poster

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Rhombus

2010-11-09T18:11:00.000+08:00

We've been learning about a new shape. It's called a rhombus, but sometimes it's also known as a diamond. It looks like a square that's been pushed over a bit.

A square

A rhombus

A rhombus has:

4 sides of equal length
4 corners
no right angles

For art this afternoon, we needed to make a rhombus with strips of paper and then make it into a picture. We made kites, fish, a dog, Christmas trees and even the Leaning Tower of Pisa! We think they look awesome!

Last week, Mrs N was contacted by a teacher in Canada. Her class wanted to ask us some questions about school in Australia. Today, we emailed them and told them everything they wanted to know. We also asked them some questions, so we can learn a little about Canadian schools. They live in the province of Saskatchewan in Canada.

View Larger Map

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Books and Vouchers

2010-11-04T20:40:00.004+08:00

As we mentioned in our last post, our class won a commendation in a competition for our drawings of teachers from our school. We won some books for our school library. Our principal suggested that we choose two of the books to keep in our classroom reading boxes. Today, we had a good look at them and chose the books we wanted.

All the books we won for our school!

Mrs N narrowed our choices down by choosing the books most suitable for our age, so we had four to choose from. They were:

The Enormous Crocodile, by Roald Dahl

The Very Itchy Bear, by Nick Bland

Harry and Hopper, by Margaret Wild

Slithering Snakes, from the Ready-to-Read series

We noticed that they were all about animals! To vote, we each wrote down the two books (just the animal names) that we'd most like to keep. We created a graph to show our results. It's a new one for us, called a pie graph. It looks like a pie that's been sliced up. Some of the pieces are bigger than others, depending on the data we use. As you can see, the books we most wanted to keep were Slithering Snakes and Harry and Hooper.

We've finished counting all the vouchers for the Coles Sports for Schools programme. We have a grand total of 35 354 vouchers! What an amazing effort from our little school! We'll be able to choose lots of great equipment!

It's been a lot of work counting all those vouchers but it was a fantastic way to learn about tens, hundred and thousands. We learned that:

10 x 10 = 100

10 x 100 = 1 000

10 x 1 000 = 10 000

Our random daily writing topic was "apples". It needed to be a story that involved an apple in some way. We were very creative and wrote some great stories.

The Werewolf

Once upon a time, a princess named Elizabeth wanted to go on a walk to find flowers. "I am going on a walk to Mum's house," she said to her servants. She set off to go to her mum's house.
On the way, she got hungry and she needed a drink. She found an apple. She took a bite and she turned evil! It was getting late and the soldiers were getting worried, so they set off to find her.

"Elizabeth," they called and out of the bushes came a big, hairy, scary werewolf. "Elizabeth, is that you?" asked one of the soldiers. "Yes, it's me, but I am more powerful," she yelled. She chased after the soldiers. "I'm going to eat you for my dinner."

She howled and howled while she was chasing the soldiers. "Run," cried a soldier, "Come to me." The werewolf howled. The soldiers ran to the castle and shut the gate but the werewolf could jump over the electric fence. The soldiers pulled the drawbridge from the moat, but the soldiers forgot that the werewolf could jump, so they didn't lock it.

The werewolf jumped over the moat and pushed the drawbridge down with the chain. "I'm going to get you," howled the werewolf. The werewolf smashed all the windows and found all the soldiers and ate them for dinner.
By Raquel

Apples

Once upon a time, there was an apple tree. It was about to grow an apple. Everyone fought over the apple.

One day, it fell off. A little girl got it then went to show her mum and dad. They said, "Do you want to eat it now?" She said, "Yes, but first I want to keep the seeds so I can grow an apple tree for everyone."

So, she planted the seeds and everyone was happy.
By Ella

The Princess

Once upon a time, there was a princess who felt like eating an apple, but there were no apples in the kingdom. The princess asked the King if he could send out all his men to find an apple. The King said, "Yes."

The King went to tell his men that the princess felt like eating an apple. All the King's men got on their horses and started looking for an apple. They went to another kingdom and asked if they had any apples. Their king said, "No," so, all the knights kept searching for an apple.

The knights thought they saw an apple tree, but it was a pomegranate tree. The knights kept looking for an apple.

They saw another kingdom, so they went to it and asked the King if they had any apples. The King said, "Yes," and the knights said, "Can you show up where they are?" The King showed the knights the apples and then one of the knights got an apple and they went back to the castle.

When the knights got back to the castle, they gave the princess the apple.
By Alex

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Melbourne Cup

2010-11-02T17:39:00.002+08:00

Today was Melbourne Cup day. It's a big horse race held in Melbourne on the first Tuesday in November every year. The race is very famous all over Australia and has been held for 150 years! It was shown live on television and the whole school watched it. Our class had a "sweep". This means that everyone picked out the name of one of the horses in the race (without looking) and if their horse came 1st, 2nd or 3rd, they won some Freddo Frogs. Indi, Charlee and Ella were the winners!

The Melbourne Cup is also a day for grown-ups to get dressed-up in fancy clothes. Ladies like to wear pretty, fancy hats. This morning, the girls made hats and the boys made neckties. There was a lot of card and paper for us to choose from, as well as feathers and sequins and other things we could glue on. Don't they look great? We were allowed to wear them all day.

Yesterday, we thought about the things we have been learning during our life. Today, we thought about the gifts we have that help us learn. They are memory, thinking and curiosity.

Memory - Our memory helps us remember how to do things, how things work and what things mean. To test our memory, we studied 15 objects for two minutes, then they were covered up and we went to our desks and wrote down as many as we could remember. Alex and Kiara remembered 10 objects each! It was actually a really tricky thing to do.

Thinking -Thinking means we use our brains to work things out. Our task was to make a horse puppet using a paper bag and some card. Mrs N gave us some instructions, then it was up to us to make them. We had to think about size and shape and what horses look like. We think they're pretty cool.

Curiosity - Being curious means to wonder about things. Wondering about things encourages us to look for answers and learn. We used bubble.us to brainstorm some of the things we wonder about.

We have exciting news! Mrs Mt, our principal, came to our room this morning with a big package. At the end of last term, we entered a competition for World Teacher's Day. We had to draw a picture of a teacher from our school and send it in. The judges loved our drawings and we won a commendation and a big pile of books for our school library! We were very excited and Mrs N and Mrs Mt were very proud of us. If you'd like to see our entries, they're in our Art Week post.

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Growing and Learning

2010-11-01T19:36:00.002+08:00

Did you know that as we grow, we need to learn new things? We had a think about that today and came up with a list of things we learn at different stages of our lives.

As a baby, we learn:

how to suck on a dummy
not to wake up in the middle of the night
how to go to sleep
how to drink from a bottle or from our mum
how to crawl

As a toddler, we learn:

how to crawl and then how to walk
that we shouldn't draw on walls
how to balance on one foot
how to ride a bike

When we're in pre-school, we learn:

to use scissors
how to glue things
how to sit still
how to write our name
how to play nicely with other children

Now that we're in Grade 2, we're learning to:

write in paragraphs
use big and interesting words in our writing
be kind and gentle
rule up margins
do mental maths

We've learned so much!

Australia is a really, really big country and has many different environments. Aboriginal people lived (and some still live) in desert and coastal regions. We learned that "coastal" means near the ocean. Coastal areas are usually cool, moist and green. There is water available and fruit and fish to eat. Aborigines who lived in the desert live in a much hotter, drier place. There is little water and they need to rely on food such as plants, seeds and animals they can catch, such as kangaroos, goannas and emus.

We watched a video about some bush foods called Honey Ants and Witchetty Grubs. We're not sure we want to eat any of them, but they are very important and popular foods among aboriginal people.

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Castle Art

2010-10-29T12:45:00.002+08:00

As part of our archaeology theme this term, we've been looking at castles. We found images online and studied the shapes of the buildings and the sorts of roofs, windows and doors they have. We then used rectangle shaped cards as templates to draw the towers, then added all the extra features like moats and flags. It was a really fun activity!

Check out our awesome castle paintings!

Today is our last day of swimming lessons, so next week should be back to normal again!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Swimming Lessons

2010-10-26T16:12:00.002+08:00

The Smarties are busy with swimming lessons this week. We have two lessons daily, so we're at the pool for most of the day. We're doing a terrific job of listening to our instructors and doing our best. It's very important that we all learn how to swim well, because Summer is almost here and many of us will be spending a lot of time in swimming pools and at the beach.

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Bat Boxes

2010-10-21T18:59:00.002+08:00

What a fantastic day we had! Mr Tonga, from Natsync Environmental, visited our classroom to help us make some bat boxes. He had cut out the pieces we needed and it was our job to glue and screw them together (we even got to use electric drills!). Mrs N was very impressed with how well we worked together. Mr Tonga took the boxes and installed them in trees close to the school. Some of them will have cameras installed, so the number of bats using the boxes can be monitored. It's very exciting to think that our handywork will benefit scientific study!

Here's our artwork from yesterday. We made it by drawing on sheets of foam, covering it with paint and pressing it onto paper. We think they look terrific!

Also, a very big CONGRATULATIONS to Taj and his family on the safe arrival of a new little sister, called Tanaia. She was born on Tuesday night and Taj is a very, very proud big brother.

Big Brother Taj

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Going Batty!

2010-10-20T22:36:00.001+08:00

We have a very special activity planned for tomorrow. We'll be building nesting boxes for microbats and we can't wait! Today, we learned all about bats and even did some bat art.

We watched a video to see what they look like close up. They're very cute, but we weren't sure if we liked the look of the sharp little claws on their wings!

Mr Tonga is the man visiting our classroom tomorrow to help us make the boxes. Here he is in a video explaining all about them.

The Smarties are BIG fans of The Magic School Bus and luckily, there's an episode all about bats. We learned lots of interesting things, such as:

Bats are mammals, which mean they're warm-blooded, have fur and their babies drink milk from their mothers.
Baby bats are called "pups".
Bats use echo-location to see, which means they make sounds (that humans can't hear) which echo off objects around them so they can work out where they are.
They like to hang upside down from rough surfaces.
Bats are nocturnal, which means they come out to feed at night.
Bat poo is called guano.
Mother bats know the sound of their own baby.
Some bats like to eat insects and some like to eat fruit.

This afternoon in Art, we did print-making. First, we drew a picture on paper about bats. Next, we were given a piece of thin foam and we re-drew our picture onto the foam. Our pencils made an indent in the soft material. We used a roller and black paint to cover the drawing and then we turned it over onto a clean sheet of paper and pressed down hard. When we pulled off the foam sheet, our drawing was there! The lines we made with our pencils were white and the rest was black. It looks just like night-time!

We can't wait until tomorrow!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Found!

2010-10-19T18:01:00.003+08:00

Our writing activity today was about finding something. We could choose to write about finding an object, an animal or anything we wanted. Here are three of our stories.

The Magical Potion

Once upon a time, there was a little girl who wanted to find a magical potion that would turn her into a mermaid. The little girl had a friend that was a mermaid. The girl's friend said, "The potion is under a tree. Choose a tree and look under it." The little girl found the potion.

One day the mermaid came and said, "Help, help! The queen has been kidnapped." The girl said, "I'll find her" and she jumped into the water and she saw a glow. She found the glow and there was a queen being held upside down over a basket of boiling lava. She called the police. The girl got the queen down and the evil octopus got put in jail.
By Meg

Connor and the Monster

Once there was a kid called Connor. He was going to bed. He was so tired that he fell asleep straight away. The next day, he was in a monster's ship. The monster was driving the ship. He found a button to get out of the ship. He jumped out of the ship and he had to find his way home. It was a long way from there.

Connor was near a cave. He thought that was bad. He thought there were big animals in the cave, but there were no animals in the cave. Connor did not know where he was at all. He really had to find his way home. It was almost night time so Connor was getting scared. Connor was in the bush so he could not find his way home at all.

Connor started to find his way home and he was almost out of the bush. He was getting closer and closer to some houses. He started to remember where he was. Connor was getting closer and closer to home. Connor had only five houses to go, then he would be home. Then, he was three houses away. He was getting very close to home. Then, Connor was only one house away. He got home and ran straight to his mum and gave her a hug.
By Alex

The Lost Shell

Once upon a time, I woke up and went outside. There was a shell on the road. There was no beach around. I was thinking about how the shell got there. Just at that moment, I thought that I should turn the shell over, so I did. There was a name on it. A name I couldn't understand. I asked my mum. My mum didn't know what it said either, so we went from house to house. At last, we found the right house.
By Catherine

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Mystery Object

2010-10-18T22:33:00.002+08:00

We tried to solve a mystery today! Mrs N was gardening on the weekend and found something interesting. It was a rock with a bird and some branches painted on it. It looks very old and we were excited to think about where it came from. We worked in groups to think of answers to some of the questions we had about the discovery.

Who made it?

A man or a lady in the olden days
An artist
Aborigines
The person who lived in the house before Mrs N

What is it for?

It could be some sort of decorative ornament for display.
Maybe it was for scaring bugs away (because they're scared of birds).
It might be a message to someone to tell them there are birds in the area.
It could have been used to tell a story.
Maybe it was for attracting other birds.

Why was it in Mrs N's garden?

The people who lived in her house before her might have left it there.
A dog might have found it somewhere else and dug a hole and put it in.
Aborigines might have lost it before the houses were built.
Aborigines might have buried it to keep it safe and so nobody would find it.
It might have been left as a message or a warning about birds.
Burglars might have dropped it and it got covered up by dirt.
It might have been left behind by someone who had no room to carry it.

Even though we probably won't find out for sure who made the object, it was still interesting to think about.

Mrs N's discovery on the weekend was well-timed, because we're learning about archaeology this term. We watched The Magic School Bus Shows and Tells and learned some very important words that will help us.

Archaeology - Finding out about people from the past based on the things they left behind.

Artifact - Items, or parts of items, made by people.

Fossil - The remains of things that used to be alive.

Hypothesis - A guess about how or why something happened, based on clues.

We have also been busy, busy, busy counting our Coles Sports for Schools vouchers. So far, we've counted over 8,000 of them and we still have quite a few to go!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

We're Back!

2010-10-13T19:51:00.002+08:00

We're back from our holidays and happy to be at school for our last term of Grade 2!

Mrs N had a very exciting holiday. She went to South Korea and she brought us back some Korean lollies to try. They were unusual flavours like pumpkin, cream jelly and sesame. We liked them! She also showed us what Korean money looks like. Their currency isn't called "dollars" like it is here in Australia. They use "won" (rhymes with "on"). 1000 won is about 1 Australian dollar.

The Smarties love to dance, so Mrs N showed us some Korean pop music (k-pop). We think they're really good dancers and we loved the catchy tunes.

Our school is participating in the Coles Sports for Schools programme. Each time we spend money at the supermarket, we get a voucher which we bring to school. The school can then use these vouchers to get sporting equipment for us. It's our class's job to count all the vouchers the school collects. This afternoon, we started sorting them into piles so that we can count them easily. It took us all afternoon, because we have SO many vouchers!

Tia, Kelsi and Allia busy sorting vouchers

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N