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

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

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

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.

Anzac Day

We're now back at school after a great holiday! Mrs G has lots and lots of things planned for us and we're going to be very busy! Later in the term, the Year 4s in our class will be celebrating our First Communion, we're going to be participating in a postcard project, a monster exchange, practising for our assembly and becoming experts on our brand new school iPads. We can't wait!

Yesterday was ANZAC Day. It's a very special day for Australians as it's one of the days we commemorate those who have fought and died in war. It is named after the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) and the date was chosen because it's the anniversary of a very important battle in World War One. The battle was part of the Gallipoli Campaign in Turkey in 1915 and was one of the first for Australian troops. Today, we watched a very informative computer animation about the Gallipoli landing on the ABC website, then we made red poppies to wear and attended the whole school prayer service.

Mrs G was very impressed with us today. She thought she was going to have to spend some time "re-training" us for Daily 5, but she didn't! We all remembered to get straight to work and focus on our tasks for the whole session. She couldn't believe it! What a fantastic class we are.

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

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