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

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

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

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

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

We are Superstars!

We achieved something HUGE in class today! Our class goal was to get to 20 minutes of completely independent reading during Read to Self. Not only did we achieve our goal today, we SURPASSED it! We read for 32 minutes! Check out the picture of our off the scale result. It was amazing! The whole class was completely silent and focused on reading. Not one person spoke, we all read the whole time and we all stayed in one spot. We are such fantastic independent readers and Mrs G is so proud of us! If we can do as well tomorrow, on Wednesday, we'll be starting our next Daily 5 activity.

Today, we learned about some websites that will help us with our homework. All the links are in the sidebar so we can get to them easily. Tutpup will help us practise our maths facts, the Listen to Reading link has lots of places we can read books online and the Look, Cover, Write, Check link takes us to a site where we can practise our spelling online.

It was Monday today which means Monday Munchies time! We tasted snow pea shoots and many of us thought they tasted pretty good. We learned that they're a great source of vitamins A and D, as well as iron and potassium. They taste really good in salads and on sandwiches.

We had another birthday in our class today. It was Jye's special day! Hope it was great!

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

The New Smarties

Here are some of the new Smarties! Most of us brought in our permission slips today, so we posed for our very first photo. Now we can start posting pictures of us hard at work and sharing some of the things we do.

In Maths today, we made glyphs about our Summer holidays. A glyph is a picture that gives us information. We answered a questionnaire and then created our picture based on our answers. When we looked at everyone's pictures afterwards, we could find out all sorts of information about their holidays without needing any words to tell us. For example, Remy's picture tells us that she tried a new activity, she had a sleepover and she is excited to be back at school! Jye's picture tells us that he tried a new food, he had a bad surprise in the holidays and he isn't very excited about the holidays being over!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs G