Purple Carrots

We tried a very familiar vegetable during Monday Munchies last week, except it was a different colour! We ate purple carrots and they tasted just like orange ones! Carrots originated around 5,000 years ago in the area where Afghanistan and Iran are now and they were originally purple. Farmers only began cultivating orange coloured carrots around 1,000 years ago.

We have been very busy in Maths learning all about fractions. We've completed lots of activities and played lots of fun games to practise our skills. One of our favourite activities was calculating the fractions of pink and white marshmallows in little plastic bags. We also enjoyed working out the fraction of vowels and consonants in words!

Last week, Mrs G went to watch some of the girls in our class play netball. This is a really popular sport in Australia, especially among girls. It's a little bit like basketball, but you can't dribble the ball, the hoop doesn't have a backboard and you can't move your feet if you're holding the ball! It can be really challenging, but it's also heaps of fun. Mrs G used to play it when she was in school too!

Mrs G also went to watch the other football team play. She was feeling tired just watching all the running the boys were doing during the game!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs G

Saturday Footy

The boys in our class LOVE to play footy! Many of them are in teams that play on weekends. This morning, Mrs G went to watch one of the teams play and was very impressed with their skills! She saw lots of marking, kicking, handballing and running, as well as some great sportsmanship. Great job Ryan, Kaiden, Joel, Jye and Adam!

We have an assembly coming up later this term. Our theme is going to be "Reading" and we'll be singing two songs about books. We have started creating some art to be displayed behind us while we're singing and dancing. We painted self portraits, then chose one of our favourite books. Mrs G photocopied the covers and we glued them to our portraits with cut-outs of our hands to make it look like we were holding the books. We think they look really cool! We really do love reading in our class, especially during Daily 5 time, when we get to make choices about what we read and where we read it.

 

 Love from Mrs G

Anzac Day

We're now back at school after a great holiday! Mrs G has lots and lots of things planned for us and we're going to be very busy! Later in the term, the Year 4s in our class will be celebrating our First Communion, we're going to be participating in a postcard project, a monster exchange, practising for our assembly and becoming experts on our brand new school iPads. We can't wait!

Yesterday was ANZAC Day. It's a very special day for Australians as it's one of the days we commemorate those who have fought and died in war. It is named after the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) and the date was chosen because it's the anniversary of a very important battle in World War One. The battle was part of the Gallipoli Campaign in Turkey in 1915 and was one of the first for Australian troops. Today, we watched a very informative computer animation about the Gallipoli landing on the ABC website, then we made red poppies to wear and attended the whole school prayer service.

Mrs G was very impressed with us today. She thought she was going to have to spend some time "re-training" us for Daily 5, but she didn't! We all remembered to get straight to work and focus on our tasks for the whole session. She couldn't believe it! What a fantastic class we are.

Love from The Smarties and Mrs G

Aussie Rules Football

In Australia, one of the most popular sports is Australian Rules Football. Sometimes it's called Aussie Rules, AFL, or footy! The AFL season has just started, so we played a new Maths game based on the way scoring is done in the games. Scoring in Aussie Rules is a bit different to most sports. When a goal is scored, the team is awarded six points. If they miss the goal, but kick the ball between the side posts, they are awarded one point and this is called a "behind".

For our Maths game, we got into pairs and had a scorecard and two different coloured dice. First, we needed to decide which dice colour represented goals and which represented behinds. We then rolled the dice and wrote the results on the scorecard. Next, was the tricky bit! We needed to calculate how many points our team got. We needed to use our six times tables and lots of mental addition. We were allowed to use calculators to check our scores, if we needed to. The game was lots of fun and was a great way to be practising some of our maths facts.

Breanna has been very busy at home. She decided that she wanted to draw a map of her house and garden. She made this fantastic "bird's eye view" diagram and brought it in to show the class. She has included a lot of detail and has drawn all the different garden areas very well, even using some symbols to represent various things. Mrs G loves to hear about the independent learning her students do away from school! Great job, Breanna!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs G

Our New Learning Tools

We have some new tools for learning in our classroom. They're called Hot Dots. We have sets of flashcards and some special electronic pens. We look at the Maths problem on a card then press the special pen onto the dot next to the number we think is the answer. If we're right, a green light appears and if we were wrong, it glows red. It's a fun way to practise our basic maths facts and we're looking forward to using them in our Maths rotations.

The topics for the photo challenge today were "in my school bag", "bus stop" and "teachers". We learned about the importance of getting permission before we take someone's picture and put it on the internet. Some people don't want their picture online and they should always be given the choice (and it's also good manners to ask before you take a photo of someone).

This is a picture Ryan took of what was inside his schoolbag
today. It was just his hat and lunchbox!

We don't have any official bus stops near our school, so Emily
took a picture of where the school buses park in the afternoon.

The lovely Mrs M and Miss F are teachers at our school and they
happily posed for Alexia to take this photo.

Love from The Smarties and Mrs G

Photo Challenge

The photo challenge is helping us practise our photography skills. We have to be really careful to keep the camera steady when we press the button (which is called a shutter), otherwise our photos will be blurry. Today's photo challenge categories were library, lunchtime and a mess.

Laura, Jared and Kaiden were photographed by Angelina
choosing books in the library.

Alexia, Halle and Emily are enjoying their food at lunchtime.
The photo was taken by Kya.

Ryleigh had no trouble finding a mess to photograph
at swimming lessons today!

Mrs G started blogging two years ago and her very first blogging students are now in Year 4. Their teacher is a good friend of Mrs G and they have a blog called Blogbusters. We're hoping to do some projects and perhaps Skype with them during the year! Many of us will end up at the same high school in a few years time and it would be fun to get to know each other before then!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs G