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

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

Penguin on the Waddle

Here's our fourth instalment of Smarties TV! This story is about a penguin in Japan that escaped from the zoo. It's from Time for Kids and is read by Nikolas, Remy and Halle. A special thankyou to Halle, who had to learn an extra section of the reading passage overnight, because Seth was unwell and not at school. Great job Halle!

We're on holidays now and won't be back at school until April 26th. Mrs G will post up the final two episodes of our news programme in the next few days.

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

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

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