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

Turn off Your TV!

Here's our 5th Smarties TV episode. It's a story about how watching too much television can be bad for our health (unless it's Smarties TV of coutse!). It's much better for us to spend some time outside running around each day, than sitting on the couch! The story is from Time for Kids.

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

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

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