The Gingerbread Man

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!

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

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!

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!

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!

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?

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