Beautiful Bunnies

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

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

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

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?

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

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!

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