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

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

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

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

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