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

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

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

Turn off Your TV!

Here's our 5th Smarties TV episode. It's a story about how watching too much television can be bad for our health (unless it's Smarties TV of coutse!). It's much better for us to spend some time outside running around each day, than sitting on the couch! The story is from Time for Kids.

Love from The Smarties and Mrs G

Our New Learning Tools

We have some new tools for learning in our classroom. They're called Hot Dots. We have sets of flashcards and some special electronic pens. We look at the Maths problem on a card then press the special pen onto the dot next to the number we think is the answer. If we're right, a green light appears and if we were wrong, it glows red. It's a fun way to practise our basic maths facts and we're looking forward to using them in our Maths rotations.

The topics for the photo challenge today were "in my school bag", "bus stop" and "teachers". We learned about the importance of getting permission before we take someone's picture and put it on the internet. Some people don't want their picture online and they should always be given the choice (and it's also good manners to ask before you take a photo of someone).

This is a picture Ryan took of what was inside his schoolbag
today. It was just his hat and lunchbox!

We don't have any official bus stops near our school, so Emily
took a picture of where the school buses park in the afternoon.

The lovely Mrs M and Miss F are teachers at our school and they
happily posed for Alexia to take this photo.

Love from The Smarties and Mrs G

Yummy Broccolini

Even though today was Wednesday, we had Monday Munchies! Mrs G has been away at meetings for a few days, so we couldn't do it on our usual day. Our healthy food this week was Broccolini, which looks a bit like little trees! It's a cross between broccoli and Chinese broccoli (kai-lan) and it can be eaten cooked or raw (we had it raw). The whole thing can be eaten, including the stems, and it's rich in Vitamins C and A, as well as containing iron, folate and calcium. Lots of us really loved it and asked for seconds, thirds and even fourths! It would make a great snack food for our lunchboxes. 

Mrs G is really proud of all of the Smarties because we ALL try the healthy foods she brings in, even if we don't think we're going to like it. It's ok not to like the taste or texture of something, as long as we TRY it! Mrs G told us about how she didn't like tomatoes in sauce when she was a little girl, but now she loves tomato sauce on pasta, or on pizza and even on chicken. Our tastes can change and just because we didn't like something when we've tried it before, it's possible we'll like it some other time, so it's important to keep trying healthy foods!

A package arrived for us today. It was some new flashcards we ordered for our classroom. They're not just ordinary flashcards though. They're actually mini whiteboards! We tried them out today and we're going to be using them for lots and lots of things to help us with our learning.

Our Daily 5 sessions are going super-well! We are now experts at Read to Self and almost experts at Word Work. We have lots of choices to practice our spelling. We can choose from mini-whiteboards, mini-blackboards, playdough, coloured matchsticks, scrabble tiles, alphabet stamps, stencils, or metallic textas. It's fun to practise our spelling words using these tactile materials. Today, for the first time, we were allowed to choose whether we did Read to Self or Word Work first. It's nice to be able to make choices in our learning. Next week, we'll be learning how to do Listen to Reading!


Love from The Smarties and Mrs G