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

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

We're Newsreaders!

For the past few weeks, we've been practising our reading fluency. We each had part of an article to read and today we recorded the first ever Smarties TV broadcast! We brought in clothes from home to make us look like the newsreaders on television and used iMovie to create a video using the greenscreen technique. Mrs G thinks we read beautifully! Here's the first news programme all finished. The story is from National Geographic for Kids. Check back tomorrow for more of our episodes!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs G

Photo Challenge

We're all caught up with our photo challenge. Our topics today were "playground", "hidey hole" and "every day".

This is an interesting photo of Jye on the playground
taken by Mark.

Jai found a great hidey hole and Joel snapped this picture.

Every morning we move our names on the Smartboard to
show we're at school. Laura took this photo.

We were very busy bloggers today! During Daily 5, we had the choice to write a blog post on our individual blogs. Lots of Smarties are posting after school too, which is great! We're going to be learning more about what makes a good blog post and how to write quality comments in the next few weeks. Please visit our blogs (links in the right side bar) and leave us some comments!

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

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