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

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

Our New iPads

Our school is very lucky. We now have some iPads to share between the classes. We were the very first students in the school to try them out! They're still being set up, but Mrs G let us use them to do some research. Each of us needed to find out four interesting facts about the country we're writing to in our Postcard Project. We then recorded them using Audioboo. We also tried out Puppet Pals, which was really fun. We could make up and record little stories and move the characters around the screen with out fingers.

Our postcards are all ready to send! Mrs G will post them tomorrow morning. We really hope we get lots of replies.

This afternoon, our school had a fair. Our class was in charge of the "Guess the Baby" competition. We had baby photos of some of the teachers and we needed to guess who was who. We also had a "Guess the Jellybeans" competition. The winner got the whole jar, full of lollies! There was also a spaghetti eating competition and Remy, Seth and Jai were in it. They all had the hands behind their backs and a plastic bowl of spaghetti in front of them. It was a race to see who could eat all their spaghetti (without hands) the fastest. Jai was the winner!

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

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

Remy's Story

Remy likes to write stories. Today, she wrote one and we published it on StoryBird. It's a great story Remy!

Grumblethe Goblin by Smarties on Storybird

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