The Wright Brothers

The Wright Brothers are famous for creating the first human controlled aeroplane. Today, we watched a video of their very first flight on December 17th, 1903. We can't imagine a world without aeroplanes, but back then, people travelled by ship if they had to travel long distances over oceans. Wilbur and Orville Wright changed the world forever! We have started researching the Wright Brothers so that we can create timelines of their lives and achievements.

Today, Mark brought in a fantastic book full of facts about flight. Mrs G decided to use it for a lesson today. We were each given a page of information from the book and we had to read it and identify any words we didn't know the meaning of. We looked them up in dictionaries and learned all sorts of new vocabulary!

One of our favourite parts of the day is Daily 5. We love having choices about how we spend our literacy time and our reading has really improved this year! Mrs G took some pictures of us during Daily 5.

We are very excited because we're going on an excursion next Tuesday! We're going to a flight simulator and will all get a chance to sit in the pilot's seat and control a virtual Boeing 737. We can't wait!

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

The Very Cranky Bear

This morning, all of our Pre-Primary to Year 4 students gathered in the library to participate in National Simultaneous Story Time. We listened to the story through the interactive iPad app, projected onto the Smartboard. It was a really funny story about a very cranky bear and how some other animals made him less cranky.

We did some more work on fractions today. This time we used chocolate! We were each given a little box of Smarties, which we had to count. This number would be the denominator.We sorted our Smarties into colours, then recorded each fraction on our sheet. We needed to write it in numbers and in words. For example, if we had 4 pink Smarties in a box that had a total of 12 in it, we would write it as 4/12, which is four twelfths. It was a very delicious Maths task!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs G

A World Without Adults

We started learning about the Six Thinking Hats today. The Hats help us to think about things in different ways and can help us make balanced decisions. We learned that the Black Hat is about identifying the negative aspects of an idea and the Yellow Hat is about thinking about the benefits or strengths. Mrs G gave us the topic "A World Without Adults" and we got into groups of three and used the black and yellow hats to think about it from different angles. Even though it sounded like a great idea to start with, once we used the black hat, we realised there would be some problems without adults around!

Yellow Hat Ideas

• We wouldn't have to go to bed early.
• We would not have to get a haircut.
• We would never get told off.
• We wouldn't have to clean our room.
• We wouldn't have to get jobs.
• We would never get in trouble.
• Everything would be free.

Black Hat Ideas

• There would be nobody to wash our clothes.
• There would be no parents to give us kisses and cuddles.
• We would have to cook for ourselves.
• We would need to ride bikes everywhere.
• Little kids might think taking drugs was ok because no adults would tell them not to.
• We might get lost.
• If we got hurt, no-one would help us.
• We wouldn't have houses and furniture

We've been using QR codes in Maths. Our task was to write a number story and then use Qurify to create a QR code for the answer. In Maths tomorrow, we're going to try to solve all the problems and then check our answers by scanning the code! Here are some of the problems we came up with.

Mr Smith had 17 pencils. 12 kids needed to use them. When they had finished, 

only 4 gave them back. 

How many pencils does Mr Smith have now? (Jared)

James had 19 jellybeans. He gave 7 to Jack. Jack gave 2 back to James.

How many jellybeans does James have? (Angela)

I had $23. I gave Mark $7, then Brock gave me $5. I gave Jared $3. 

How many dollars do I have now? ( Adam)

I have 30 cats and 40 dogs. I bought 10 more cats and Alexia bought 1 cat from me. 

How many animals do I have now? (Kya)

Handyman Jared had 18 motorbikes in his shed and they were for sale. 

Jared sold 6 to his mate, Joel, then Mark bought 3 too. 

How many motorbikes does Handyman Jared have now? (Joel)

Love from The Smarties and Mrs G.

Green Screening

Recording our news stories has been really fun. We have been working hard on learning our passages and developing our fluency and expression. Some of us were very nervous while we waited for our turn to record! When it was our go, we sat in front of a wall with green cardboard stapled to it. After it was recorded, Mrs G used iMovie to add a photograph in the background to replace the green. It was our first attempt at trying something like this and we're looking forward to making improvements and trying it again with another project next term

Here are the next two episodes of Smarties TV, recorded in class today. The first article we read is a story from Behind the News and is about the St John's First Aid cadets. The second one is from National Geographic for Kids and is about some very old writing!

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

Notable Quotables

Each Friday, Mrs G is going to introduce a new quote. We call them "Notable Quotables". Today's quote was:

Reading is to the mind 

what exercise is to the body.

We know that our bodies need exercise to stay strong, healthy and flexible. Our minds need to be exercised too and reading helps with this. When we read stories or look up information in books, we are using our brains which helps keep them active and switched on!

We've been learning some maths games to play with partners. They are helping us practise basic maths facts and they're also fun! Some we play with counters and dice and some we need playing cards for.

Our Daily 5 sessions are going really well! We have our Read to Self stamina up to sixteen minutes, which is great for only our third day. Mrs G is so impressed and pleased with us! We are working very hard at remembering all the things we need to do, such as:

• Being quiet so everyone can concentrate
• Getting started straight away
• Eyes on the book
• Staying in one spot
• Reading the whole time
• Real reading, not fake reading

We are great at staying focused and not letting interruptions from visitors to the classroom distract us. We just keep on reading!

Next week, as part of our health programme, we start Monday Munchies. We get to try a healthy food, like a fruit or a vegetable each week. Today, we created fruit and vegetable faces to decorate the covers of our scrap books.

It was Joel's birthday today and he brought delicious chocolate cupcakes for everyone in the class. Thanks Joel (and Joel's mum!). We hope you had a great day!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs G