Thanks Brock!

Every Monday in our class, we have Monday Munchies and it’s one of our favourite times of the week! Mrs G brings a fruit or vegetable for us to taste. Some of the things  we have tried are kiwi fruit, broccolini, snow pea shoots, kiwi berries, dragonfruit, rockmelon, persimmon, coconut, tangelos and cauliflower. Mrs G is always so proud of us, because we ALL try everything, even if we’ve had it before and didn’t like it. We know that sometimes we can try a food and not like it (perhaps because it wasn’t quite ripe), however, it’s always a good idea to try it again another time, because we just might find we love it!

Brock decided that he would give Mrs G a break this week and he brought in not one, but TWO Monday Munchies for us to try.  You can see them in the picture above. The orange things are kumquats, which are tiny citrus fruits. You can eat them raw, including the skin, and they’re quite popular for making jams and marmalades.  The other fruit that Brock brought in was something he picked off a tree at his uncle’s house on the weekend. They are Brazilian Grapes. He took a photo to show us the unusual way they grow. They grow right out of the trunk and branches! We’re used to seeing fruit on the end of branches, where the little twigs and leaves are, but these ones don’t grow like that!  Thanks Brock for bringing in such interesting fruits for us to try this week.

Love from The Smarties and Mrs G

A New Term

We had a little break from blogging because we have been SO busy! The final weeks of last term were action-packed with an assembly and our very special First Holy Communion celebration. We have also just had two weeks holiday from school and have all come back relaxed and refreshed (especially Mrs G!).

This term, we're learning about flight. Today, we looked at pictures of a lot of things that fly and were asked to classify them any way we wanted. Mrs G was very impressed with our ideas. We thought of a few that she hadn't thought of! We sorted them into categories such as:

• living or non-living
• made of metal and not made of metal
• needs, or doesn't need a human to control/steer it 
• needs, or doesn't need a human to start it
• man-made or natural
• has, or hasn't got a motor or engine

This term we are extra lucky. Miss F is a student teacher and will be in our class all term! We also have Miss   K who will be teaching us every Wednesday while Mrs G does work in the office. We are looking forward to the extra fun we'll have with our new teachers and can't wait to learn lots of new things with them!


Love from The Smarties and Mrs G

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

We Got Mail!

It was a very exciting morning for the Smarties today. When Mark went to the office to deliver something, Mrs D gave him something that came in the mail for us. It was our very first postcard and it was from Russia! It was in a beautiful envelope with some really cool stamps and pictures.

Our mail from Russia

Today, I had to take an iPad to the office for Mr F. When I left I got the postcard from Russia. When I got back to the classroom, I said out loud, "We got a postcard from Russia!" We are going to put it on the board of postcards. Mrs G let us pass it around. When everyone had a look, we went on the blog. We saw them learning English doing "Little Cow". Then, Mrs G showed us how they write in Russia.


By Mark


In Monday Munchies this week, we tasted raw mushrooms. Some of us have tried cooked mushrooms before, but not many of us have had them uncooked. Some people like to eat them in salads, or just as a snack. We were very surprised to learn that mushrooms are not plants. They are actually a fungus. We thought that all fungi (the plural of fungus) were green, yucky and inedible!

We have started learning about fractions. We know that fractions are equal parts of a whole. We created some delicious looking fraction sundaes to help us understand. What a shame we couldn't make real sundaes! We chose how many scoops of each flavour we wanted, then wrote it in fractions. We thought it was pretty easy because it was just like when Mrs G marks our spelling tests. We get a score out of 15 and it's written as a fraction.

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

Big News!

Mrs G thinks we have a great idea about what blogging is all about, so she's created blogs of our very own at kidblog. We will be using them for some class activities, as well as to write about whatever we want at home. Mrs G is happy, because since we got home from school today, quite a few of us have already added new posts! It seems that we have some very keen writers in our class.

Emily and Adam posting on their own blogs

It's very exciting that we have the chance to write about anything and have the whole world able to read it! However, it's also a big responsibility. We came up with some blogging guidelines that will help us be responsible bloggers and internet users.

• Don't post any personal information, such as last names, the name of our school, or the places we live.
• Always ask permission before we put anyone's photo on the internet.
• Use correct spelling, punctuation and grammar at all times!
• Don't say anything that might hurt somebody's feelings. 
• Be proud of everything we post - we should be happy for everyone we know (including our parents and grandparents) to read anything we write.

You can access our blogs by clicking on the links in the right side bar. Please leave us some comments!

Our photo challenge topics for today were "wet", "art" and "a great smile". Our volunteer photographers today were Maddi, Seth and Adam.

Maddi was the artist of the week for our class last week, so
she photographed her picture on display in the artroom window.

Seth found a wet area outside our classroom where someone
had spilled their water bottle.

Brock has a fantastic smile and Adam photographed it beautifully!

It's Monday which means we had Monday Munchies today! Our healthy food this week was one that nobody had tried before and most of us had never even seen it before. We tried kiwiberries. They're about the size of a cherry tomato and have smooth, dark green skin. They felt a little squishy and juicy. When we cut them open, they looked exactly like Kiwifruit! That's because they're another species, which are smaller and without furry skin. We thought they tasted almost the same as Kiwifruit, but a little bit like a fresh fig too.

Love from The Smarties and Mrs G

10,000 Hits

After checking our hit counter on Friday, we predicted that we would reach 10,000 hits over the long weekend and we were right! We were happy to see that we have had 10,004 visitors to our blog since the start of this year. It's exciting to know that we have shared our learning with so many people!

We've decided to participate in a photo challenge. We saw that 3H at Merewether Heights Primary School had organised a challenge, but we didn't see it in time to begin when they did. We started it today and we'll take two, or three photos each day this week to catch up! It will be a good way to practise our photography skills with our class camera. Each day, there is a word or phrase and we are going to take it in turns to think of a way we can take a photo of something representing those ideas. Today, we did respect, noisy and being physical.

We are showing respect for our classroom resources by putting them
away where they belong. This photograph was taken by Hailey.

Angelina and Jared seem to be enjoying banging on the desk
and being noisy. Chelsey took this picture.

Kaiden and Laura are being physical on the playground.
This photo was taken by Jai.

We tried something new today. We did "running dictation" and it was really fun, but very challenging! We got into pairs and one of us was the writer and one of us was the runner. The runner had a piece of paper with two or three sentences written on it and they were about ten metres away from their partner. It was the runner's job to carefully read the sentences, put their paper down, then run to their partner and tell them what was written on the paper. The writer then needed to write it down. The runner could go back to check the paper as often as they liked. It sounds pretty easy, right? WRONG!

We discovered that clear communication was really, really important! The runner had to clearly dictate the words and the writer had to listen very carefully. Lots of team work was required to make sure that the finished sentences were exactly the same as the ones Mrs G gave us. Our spelling and punctuation needed to be absolutely perfect and we had to make sure that we didn't leave any words out, or add extra ones in. Not only was it a great exercise in communication, but it also showed us the importance of proof-reading and editing our writing until it is perfect. It's going to be a regular activity in our class and we'll be challenging ourselves to get better and better at it!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs G

I Hate Books!

Don't worry. We don't really hate books. We LOVE books! I Hate Books is the name of a story Mrs G is reading to us this week. It's written by Kate Walker and is about a boy who can't read, but is fantastic at making up stories. It's a really funny story with some interesting characters. It's one of the books in our classroom library, which is full of great books. We can all find things we want to read, so none of us hate books!

Once again, our Read to Self session was fantastic, which means that we start learning how to use the Word Work materials tomorrow. We can't wait! We'll be doing lots of hands-on and fun activities to help us practise our spelling words each week.

We started a new activity today. It's called the Boggle Challenge. Each week, Mrs G will put some letters on the display board. Our job is to find as many words as we can using letters that touch each other, just like the real Boggle game. We get points based on how many letters are in each word we find. At the end of the week, the person with the highest points becomes our "Champion Boggler". We've worked out that using a dictionary to find words might help us with the longer ones, so we get more points.

Something else new today is our Whiz Kids Club. We have a wiki with 100 questions about all sorts of things. Mrs G wants us to choose a question we'd like to answer, learn the correct answer off by heart, then tell her. Some of the questions are really tricky and will require lots of research to answer. Others are a little easier and won't take us long to learn. We get a point for each question we answer correctly. We'll eventually have a leader board to celebrate the students who are putting in some extra time and effort to learn new things. We don't have to join the Whiz Kids Club, but it's a great way to learn new and interesting things. Mrs G would be VERY pleased if we all tried at least a few questions.

Love from The Smarties and Mrs G