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

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

All About Plants

We've been learning about plants and watched a Magic Schoolbus video explaining how plants grow and make food. We learned that plants need sun, water and air. If they don't have all of these things in the right amounts, they won't grow very well and may even die. Today, our principal Mr F, helped us plant some seedlings (which are baby plants) in our class vegetable garden. We need to check them each day to make sure there are no insects eating them and we also need to water them, especially on hot days.

For Monday Munchies this week, we tried rockmelon. We learned that they are called cantaloupes in some parts of the world, which we thought was funny. Rockmelons are round, juicy, and bright orange on the inside, with lots of seeds. Their skin is hard and rough and  you don't eat it. Hailey and Ella recorded their thoughts about this week's fruit on a Fotobabble.

We've been very busy taking photos for our photo challenge. We're getting pretty good at thinking of things to photograph and are having fun using Mrs G's iPhone to take the pictures!

Angelina and Ella show Remy their fruit!

Breanna was very creative when she took this picture
of a round opening in the playground.

Jye went to the art room to take this
picture of paper.

A close up of Jared by Nikolas.

Miss V's shoes were photographed
by Ella.

Brock took a picture of our Boggle letters.

 Love from The Smarties and Mrs G

Why we Love Comments

We are really enjoying having our individual blogs to write on. We are having lots of discussions about what makes good posts and good comments, as well as beginning to experiment with adding photographs and changing the text colours and fonts. We especially love receiving comments from the other Smarties, as well as parents and other readers. We made a video today explaining why we love to receive comments and how they make us feel.You can find our individual blogs in the links on the right hand side of this page, so please click on one of them and leave us a comment, or two!

Our photo challenge topics today were "lunch" and "guess where". We're having a lot of fun thinking of possibilities for photos.

Guess where Nikolas is? Kaiden found him and took this great
photo. Doesn't Nik look surprised!

Yum yum, Breanna and Mark show Angela their lunch

Mrs G is away from school until Tuesday, so we'll have to do some catching up with our photo challenge then! Tomorrow, she's going to listen to Alan November talk. He's a world famous expert on using technology in schools and she's very excited about what she will learn (teachers are always learning too!).

Love from The Smarties and Mrs G

Kiwifruit

For Monday Munchies today, we tried a fruit that has two names. It's called Kiwifruit, or Chinese Gooseberry. It originated in China and is now grown in many countries around the world. It's a strange fruit because it has fur on the outside, but inside it's bright green with tiny black seeds. It's pretty delicious and a great source of Vitamin C. Press play on the Fotobabble below to hear Breanna, Maddi, Charli and Angela tell us what they think of Kiwifruit.

Love from The Smarties and Mrs G

We are Superstars!

We achieved something HUGE in class today! Our class goal was to get to 20 minutes of completely independent reading during Read to Self. Not only did we achieve our goal today, we SURPASSED it! We read for 32 minutes! Check out the picture of our off the scale result. It was amazing! The whole class was completely silent and focused on reading. Not one person spoke, we all read the whole time and we all stayed in one spot. We are such fantastic independent readers and Mrs G is so proud of us! If we can do as well tomorrow, on Wednesday, we'll be starting our next Daily 5 activity.

Today, we learned about some websites that will help us with our homework. All the links are in the sidebar so we can get to them easily. Tutpup will help us practise our maths facts, the Listen to Reading link has lots of places we can read books online and the Look, Cover, Write, Check link takes us to a site where we can practise our spelling online.

It was Monday today which means Monday Munchies time! We tasted snow pea shoots and many of us thought they tasted pretty good. We learned that they're a great source of vitamins A and D, as well as iron and potassium. They taste really good in salads and on sandwiches.

We had another birthday in our class today. It was Jye's special day! Hope it was great!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs G