Future Pilots

Today, our class went on an excursion and it was AWESOME! We visited the Flight Experience Centre in Perth, which is a place people can go to to use a flight simulator. It looked exactly like the cockpit of a Boeing 737, with lots of lights, buttons and dials! We all got a chance to pilot the plane, guided by a real life pilot, Captain Chris. Some of us flew over London and saw the Eye and Big Ben and the rest of us flew over New York and saw the Statue of Liberty. It was great fun! While each group waited for our turn in the cockpit, Captain Cait showed us some videos about how planes fly and about all the things airline staff need to do after a plane lands to make it ready to take off again. Tomorrow, we'll be writing about our day, so we'll add more information then. For now, check out this Animoto and other pictures!

A big thankyou to Nikolas' mum, who came along to help and to Mr F, our principal, who drove the bus!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs G

Our New iPads

Our school is very lucky. We now have some iPads to share between the classes. We were the very first students in the school to try them out! They're still being set up, but Mrs G let us use them to do some research. Each of us needed to find out four interesting facts about the country we're writing to in our Postcard Project. We then recorded them using Audioboo. We also tried out Puppet Pals, which was really fun. We could make up and record little stories and move the characters around the screen with out fingers.

Our postcards are all ready to send! Mrs G will post them tomorrow morning. We really hope we get lots of replies.

This afternoon, our school had a fair. Our class was in charge of the "Guess the Baby" competition. We had baby photos of some of the teachers and we needed to guess who was who. We also had a "Guess the Jellybeans" competition. The winner got the whole jar, full of lollies! There was also a spaghetti eating competition and Remy, Seth and Jai were in it. They all had the hands behind their backs and a plastic bowl of spaghetti in front of them. It was a race to see who could eat all their spaghetti (without hands) the fastest. Jai was the winner!

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

Swimming Lessons

This week and next week, our whole class is doing swimming lessons. It's really important for children living in Australia to learn how to swim because we have lots of beaches and swimming pools. We're all really good swimmers. Check out the photos in the Animoto video to see us in action!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs G

What we Like About Year 3/4

In writing today, we wrote about some of the things we like about being in Year 3/4. We then recorded ourselves reading it aloud on VoiceThread. Some of the most popular things about our class are Daily 5, Monday Munchies, brain breaks and Tutpup.Mrs G is very pleased that there are so many things we like about our class! 

Mrs G is going to be away from school for three days next week, so we did our Monday Munchies today instead of on Monday. We tried dried apples. Dried fruit can be healthy in moderation, especially if it's a brand that doesn't have any added sugar or oil. Most of us thought dried apples were really yummy and we'd love some in our lunchboxes, but some of us said we'd prefer to eat a fresh apple.

Love from The Smarties and Mrs G

Yummy Broccolini

Even though today was Wednesday, we had Monday Munchies! Mrs G has been away at meetings for a few days, so we couldn't do it on our usual day. Our healthy food this week was Broccolini, which looks a bit like little trees! It's a cross between broccoli and Chinese broccoli (kai-lan) and it can be eaten cooked or raw (we had it raw). The whole thing can be eaten, including the stems, and it's rich in Vitamins C and A, as well as containing iron, folate and calcium. Lots of us really loved it and asked for seconds, thirds and even fourths! It would make a great snack food for our lunchboxes. 

Mrs G is really proud of all of the Smarties because we ALL try the healthy foods she brings in, even if we don't think we're going to like it. It's ok not to like the taste or texture of something, as long as we TRY it! Mrs G told us about how she didn't like tomatoes in sauce when she was a little girl, but now she loves tomato sauce on pasta, or on pizza and even on chicken. Our tastes can change and just because we didn't like something when we've tried it before, it's possible we'll like it some other time, so it's important to keep trying healthy foods!

A package arrived for us today. It was some new flashcards we ordered for our classroom. They're not just ordinary flashcards though. They're actually mini whiteboards! We tried them out today and we're going to be using them for lots and lots of things to help us with our learning.

Our Daily 5 sessions are going super-well! We are now experts at Read to Self and almost experts at Word Work. We have lots of choices to practice our spelling. We can choose from mini-whiteboards, mini-blackboards, playdough, coloured matchsticks, scrabble tiles, alphabet stamps, stencils, or metallic textas. It's fun to practise our spelling words using these tactile materials. Today, for the first time, we were allowed to choose whether we did Read to Self or Word Work first. It's nice to be able to make choices in our learning. Next week, we'll be learning how to do Listen to Reading!


Love from The Smarties and Mrs G