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

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

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

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

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