Platypuses

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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:

1. 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
2. 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.
3. 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