Mapping Fun!

View Rottnest Island Fun in a larger map

Our reading activity this morning involved a map! Mrs N had made a map using Google Maps. She added some markers and some questions. We needed to navigate the map, read each question carefully and then answer it on our answer sheets. It was a lot of fun and it really made us work hard! We needed to use our skills in reading, writing, maths, thinking, using a touch pad, following directions and matching symbols. We learned how to make the map larger and smaller and how to move it around. We also practised using Google to help us with some answers and to help check our spelling. Thanks to Kyle's mum, who was our class helper today!

 
This afternoon, we had a visit from "Science Alive". Mr Doyle told us about how Science is all about discovering and finding out. Scientists study animals, plants, people from the past, dinosaurs, diseases and how we can cure them, stars and planets, fish in the sea, bugs and insects and everything else in the world we live in! The closer scientists look at the world the more we realise how beautiful and incredible it is.

Our senses help up learn about the world, but sometimes they can trick us. Mr Doyle showed us a trick. He held up two curved pieces of wood and asked us which was bigger. We all guessed wrong because they were exactly the same size. It was just an optical illusion making one look bigger than the other, because of the curves.

He also talked to us about water and how interesting it is. All the water on the Earth has been here for billions of years. It is constantly going around and around the water cycle. No new water is made, it just changes form. This means that the water we drink could be the same water a dinosaur drank, or that a famous person bathed in! Luckily, the water is cleaned and purified by evaporation, which leaves the dirt behind.

We did lots and lots of practice for our poetry recital. Just 4 sleeps to go! We'll be performing it at school assembly tomorrow and we're very excited!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Story, Cubes, Poetry and Art

We loved the story Mrs N wrote for us, using Zooburst. It was amazing to see the characters pop-up, especially when we used the webcam! We can't wait to try to make our own. Next week, we're going to start planning our stories.

We have learned about a 3D shape called a cube. We now know that cubes:

• have 6 faces (or sides)
• have edges and corners
• stack easily 
• make good blocks for building with
• are used to make dice

We made cubes

Today, we learned about using commas in lists. When we are writing a sentence and we need to make a list of lots of things, we use commas to separate them, instead of saying "and" each time. It makes our writing much nicer to read. We only need to use one "and" and that's just before the last thing in the list. Here are some sentences we wrote in daily writing.

I like sheep, dogs, penguins, pineapples, kittens, cats, and puppies. I like ponies, pizza and apples.
By Kelsi

I like pizza, Rexy, motorbikes, Lego, computers and chocolate. I like cricket, guitar and chooks.
By Joel

I like pizza, stickers, rabbits, Lego, rulers, Mum and Dad. I like cats, dogs, footy, my friends, cricket and guitar.
By Joshua

I like apples, motorbikes, tigers, lions, mangoes, scary movies, action, scooters, bikes, Tux Paint, our blog, art, pizza, tacos, fish and chips, sharks, Hungry Jacks, Chooks, football, McDonalds, KFC, chips, chocolate fountains, lollies and Mrs N.
By Jack

I like Star Wars, sharks, Smiggles, my dad and my mum. I like Lego, laptops, Moshi Monster,school and the Smarties. I like KFC, Chooks, Hungry Jacks and my birthday.
By Alex

We're getting excited about our upcoming recital of The Triantiwontigongolope. Mrs N is very, very proud of us, because we know ALL the words! We are now working on using our voices to make it interesting for the audience to listen to. If we change the volume of our voices in certain parts, or the speed we are talking, it makes the poem more entertaining. We are also learning to use facial expressions to express the emotions of the poem. We might have a practice performance at school assembly on Friday so that we feel less nervous when we're doing the real thing!

While we were practising our poem, we began to wonder what a Triantiwontigongolope might look like, so we decided to use our imagination, as well as some of the clues in the poem, and draw one! Here's what we came up with.

We have an extra long weekend coming up! All the teachers in the school are going to a conference on Monday and Tuesday, so they can learn lots of new things. We were surprised that teachers still have things to learn!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

A Story for the Smarties

Hello Smarties

I found a new, exciting way for us to publish our stories called Zooburst. I made one to show you, but we'll have a go at creating one together on Thursday. Read the story at the bottom and click on the characters to see what they're thinking. I hope you like it! It was a lot of fun to make.



(If you have a webcam at home, press play, then click on "Webcam Mode" and follow the instructions. You'll get a HUGE surprise!)

Love from Mrs N

Calculators are Cool!

Kate, Meg and Kyle calculating

We used calculators a lot today. We calculated some really big sums, like these ones:

3 318 624 + 8 487 311 = 11 805 935

8 328 692 - 4 168 341 = 4 160 351

9 999 999 ÷ 3 = 3 333 333

6 218 x 387 = 2 406 366

We feel very clever to be working with such BIG numbers! We need to be able to work out some maths in our heads, or on paper, but calculators are useful tools for more complicated work. They are also really great for writing words too!

We discovered that when you type in some numbers and then turn the calculator upside-down, they look like certain letters. In pairs, we tried to find as many calculator words as we could! Some of the ones we came up with are: he (34), bee (338), hello (0.7734), Lego (0637), egg (663), be (38), hi (14), bob (808), so (0.5), see (335), hill (7714), blog (6078), bill (7718) and igloo (0.0791). It's very, very tricky to think backwards and upside down, but it was great fun and really gave our brains a work-out!

Did you know that numbers can be either odd or even? We did some investigations with counters and discovered some interesting things that make it easier to understand. We made a video about what we learned!

We were allowed to wear free dress to school today if we brought in a gold coin ($1 or $2) donation. We are helping to raise money for the Mary MacKillop Foundation. Mary MacKillop is going to be Australia's first saint. She will be canonised (which means made a saint) in October, this year.

We're all looking forward to our well-deserved weekend. We've been working very hard this week!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Insect Rally

In Daily Writing this morning, we watched a movie on YouTube called Insect Rally. There were no words in the movie, but it was easy to tell what the story was about. Mrs N got us to write re-tells of the story. We are learning to write beginnings, middles and endings in our writing, so we needed to write at least three sentences so we could make sure we had all the parts of the story included.

At the beginning, the bugs were all in a hurry to get to the race.The insects in the race were an ant, bee, wasp, dragonfly, fly and a snail. In the middle all the insects crashed except for the snail. At the end, the snail won because all the other insects crashed and the other snails were excited.
By Matthew

At  the beginning, there was a snail, a mosquito, a ladybird and a dragonfly. They were having a race. In the middle, they all had a crash except the snail. At the end the snail won and all the other snails came to celebrate.
By Caitlin

At the beginning, the wasp, fly, dragonfly and lady bug got ready for the race and they lined up at the starting line. In the middle, they smashed. First the dragonfly, then the wasp, then the bee and then the lady bug. At the end the snail at last got over the finishing line and won. His friends were happy.
By Indi

At the beginning the bugs practised, then they raced.The ant said "go" and the dragonfly was in the front, then the lady bug pushed him and then it fell over. In the middle, all the bugs hurried to the finish, then the bugs crashed and the snail didn't crash. At the finish, the snail won.
By Taj

At the beginning, they were having a race and the leaders of the bugs were at the start line.The ant said "go" and the bugs were bumping the dragonfly. In the middle, the wasp bumped into a rock and the fly bumped into a newspaper. At the end, the lady bug bumped into a stop sign and the snail won the race.
By Lachlan

At the beginning, there was a dragonfly and a bee and a wasp and a snail starting a race. In the middle they all crashed except the snail. At the end the snails all cheered for him.
By Joel

We've been learning about water in Science this term. Today, we went on a water walk around our school. We wanted to investigate all the places we can find water and what we do with it. We took clipboards and pencils and recorded all our observations. When we got back to class, we chose something to write about and illustrate.

Kate and Isaac's work

We made a giant list of all the ways water is used at our school. We didn't realise there were so many until we starting writing them down! Here are some of them.

At our school, we use water for:

• washing our hands
• washing our faces
• watering the gardens
• drinking
• flushing the toilet
• making cement for the new buildings
• making ice packs
• watering the grass
• washing our paint and glue brushes
• washing up after cooking
• the teachers to make coffee
• washing the dishes in the staffroom
• washing the windows
• wiping the tables and benches
• cooking
• making play dough
• keeping flowers alive in vases

While we were looking at the hits on our blog this morning, we discovered that we'd had a LOT of visitors in the last two days. We used our calculators to do a division sum. We had 517 visitors in 2 days, so we entered 517÷2= which worked out to be 258.5 visitors per day. We were a little confused by the .5 at the end of the number, but we learned that it means "half". ½ is another way of writing it.

Yesterday, we had a try at putting little hearts in our blog posts after learning about using HTML code from our blogging friends at 2KM. ♥ We wanted to learn how to do lots more of them, so we now have a display in our classroom, with sixteen different picture codes we can use! We can't wait to try them out next time we're on our writing blog.

Wow, this was a long post today. We sure were busy bees!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

The Triantiwontigongolope

In a few weeks, The Smarties are going to the Performing Arts Festival in Perth. We'll be reciting a poem called The Triantiwontigongolope. It's very funny and we like it a lot. It was written by an Australian poet called C.J. Dennis, in 1921, which is almost a century ago! What do you think of the poem?

The Triantiwontigongolope by C.J. Dennis

There's a very funny insect that you do not often spy,
And it isn't quite a spider and it isn't quite a fly,
It is something like a beetle, and a little like a bee,
But nothing like a woolly grub that climbs upon a tree.
Its name is quite a hard one, but you'll learn it soon, I hope.
So try:
Tri-
Tri-anti-wonti-
Triantiwontigongolope.

It lives on weeds and wattle-gum, and has a funny face,
Its appetite is hearty, and its manners a disgrace.
When first you come upon it, it will give you quite a scare,
But when you look for it again, you find it isn't there.
And unless you call it softly, it will stay away and mope.
So try:
Tri-
Tri-anti-wonti-
Triantiwontigongolope.

It trembles if you tickle it, or tread upon its toes,
It is not an early riser, but it has a snubbish nose.
If you sneer at it, or scold it, it will scuffle off in shame,
But it purrs and purrs quite proudly if you call it by its name,
And offer it some sandwiches of sealing-wax and soap.
So try:
Tri-
Tri-anti-wonti-
Triantiwontigongolope.

But of course you haven't seen it, and I truthfully confess,
That I haven't see it either, and I don't know its address.
For there isn't such an insect, though there really might have been,
If the trees and grass were purple, and the sky was bottle green.
It's just a little joke of mine, which you'll forgive, I hope.
So try:
Tri-
Tri-anti-wonti-
Triantiwontigongolope.

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Trying Something New

Today, we did daily writing on our writing blog. The topic was free choice, which we were very happy about! We had a look at 2KM's blog and saw that they were learning about HTML code. We decided to give it a go too. We learned that to make a heart you type & hearts; (but without the space after the &). It doesn't change it right away, but when our posts were published, we could see the hearts. Some of us put them into our blog writing. ♥ ♥ ♥

In Library, Mr B read us Hairy Maclary's Bone. Hairy Maclary was walking back from the butcher with a bone. All the dogs in the neighbourhood were following him, but they got stuck on the way. He managed to get home with his bone, safe and sound. We thought it was a great story!

In Maths this afternoon, we used counters to find lots of ways to make 20. We used something we haven't tried before. It's called Primary Pad. It's an online word processor that we could all use at the same time. We could see what everyone else was writing, while they were writing it. Everybody liked it because it was fun, we each had a different colour for writing with and because we could share the answers and ideas we came up with. We also love doing addition sums!

Jake doing his counting

We are learning about the Fruits of the Holy Spirit. These are things that help us to be good people. The Fruits are joy, faithfulness, gentleness, peacefulness, love, kindness, patience, self-control and goodness. We are especially thinking about love at the moment and how we can show it to our friends, family and even people we don't know. We can:

• make friends with new students
• let other people play with us
• forgive our friends when we have a fight
• help younger students

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N