Hot Cross Buns

We had a day FULL of Hot Cross Buns!

We learned that Hot Cross Buns are a traditional food that we eat at Easter. They are spiced buns with a cross on the top, which represents the cross of Jesus.

This morning, we had a taste test. We tried Hot Cross Buns with fruit, some with choc chips and some with nothing in them. We needed to decide which one we liked the best. We made a class pictograph to record our results. We discovered that Hot Cross Buns with chocolate chips were the Smarties' favourites, but we all liked all of the types we tried.

Catherine and Isaac

Raquel

Tia and Joshua

Kelsi and Ella with our pictograph

Mrs N taught us a new song. It's called "Hot Cross Buns" which is a very old song from England. It was fun to sing. We recorded it so you can hear us singing.

We hope you liked it!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Hello Smarties

Teddy Gram Note Generator

A Visit from the Eagles

The Smarties with Brad from the West Coast Eagles

Our school was very lucky today. We had some special visitors. Brad, from the West Coast Eagles Football Club came to talk to us about lots of very important things. We learned a LOT.

He spoke to us about the benefits of playing sport. When we play sport, we get the "Three Fs". They are:

FUN     FITNESS    FRIENDS

He also told us about the "Five Rs". These are things that we should try to do so that we can grow up to be the best we can be. They are:
RESPECT OURSELVES - We need to respect our bodies by taking care of them.

RESPECT OTHER PEOPLE - We need to respect the ideas and opinions of the people around us. as well as being good sports.

RESPECT THE ENVIRONMENT - We need to look after our school, our town, our country and the Earth.

REACH OUR POTENTIAL - We should always do our best and make the most of the special talents we have.

REACH OUT TO THE COMMUNITY - Doing good things for other people in our community is very important.

Brad had a friend with him! He was a very big surprise. His name was Rick "The Rock" Eagle. He was funny and silly. He made us laugh a lot. Brad checked Rick's lunchbox and saw that he had some very healthy foods inside it, but there were some things that are not so good for him. We talked about the importance of eating healthy, natural foods and drinking lots of water because they are the best things for our bodies. 

Our activity in class this afternoon was to think about the things that are in a healthy lunchbox. We decided there should be some fruit, vegetables, grainy bread, some cheese or yogurt, lean meat and a water bottle. We made some pictures to show what we'd like in our healthy lunchbox.

For those of you who aren't Australian, you might be wondering who the "West Coast Eagles" are. They are an Australian Rules Football team from Western Australia. Many of The Smarties barrack for them!  If you're not Australian, then you might not know about Australian Rules Football (also called AFL). It's one of the most popular sports here and many children play it (but with modified rules because the grown-up version can be very rough!). It's nothing like soccer and not much like American Football. Here's a YouTube video we found to give you an idea!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

We Ate GoldfishToday!

No, don't worry. They weren't the goldfish that swim around in ponds. They were Goldfish crackers that were sent to us by our Kentucky Lunch friends. We received our much anticipated parcel from them this morning and we were beside ourselves with excitement! Inside, was a card, signed by all their class, a book called The Giant Jam Sandwich, as well as two packets of cheese flavoured Goldfish. We all tried them and thought they were delicious! There were even enough for us to take a few home to share with our mums and dads.

We decided to use Daily Writing time to write our thoughts about Goldfish and our other presents. We also made Tux Paint pictures about them. If you go to our Class Publishing Wiki, you'll see some of our finished products and you'll hear us reading out some of our writing. We didn't get time to record them all today, but they should be done tomorrow.

Alex, Kelsi and Raquel with our presents

Meg and Jack looking very happy!

We have a new display in our classroom. On our world map, we've labeled the countries we're doing activities with. We really love learning about the children in other places in the world!

We've finished all of our Monster Exchange drawings and they should be put up on our wiki by next week. We can't wait to compare our pictures!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Open Night

Tonight was Open Night at school. Our parents had a chance to come into our classroom and have a look at all the great work we've been doing. We had some laptops set up so we could show them how fantastic we are at navigating around our blog and all the links. They also got to look at our books and at the work displayed on the walls. We think they liked it!


This morning, we had a nice surprise. Our Kentucky friends had made a Photo Story about our Lunch Project. It was really great to hear their voices and to listen to all they things they learned about us. If you'd like to see it, you can find it here.

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

We are Techno Geniuses!

Mrs N is SO pleased with us! We had the laptops in our classroom ALL day today and we really impressed her with some of our skills!

In the morning, we used this really great site which let us design our own mask and then print it out. We needed to choose 5 animals from the list and it made a mask picture using some of the physical characteristics of those animals. We printed them, coloured them in and wrote descriptions. We needed to type the URL in all by ourselves, which we all did a fantastic job of! We learned that if there are capital letters in a web address, then we need to make sure we do capital letters when we type it in too. Thanks to Jack's mum who came in to help us while we were doing these. Here are the finished products.
We  also played Tutpup, which we LOVE and we're fantastic at navigating to the right address, logging ourselves in and choosing the right games to play. We are almost completely independent at doing this now. It is fabulous Mental Maths practice.

Our final activity was using software called Tux Paint. It's a painting programme and we had to draw a picture of ourselves. We had some time to play around and explore all the neat things we could do with it. There are all sorts of pictures and special effects we could use. Mrs N is extremely impressed with our touchpad skills. She is amazed by some of the pictures we created because she was expecting it to be very hard for us to draw without using a mouse, but we proved her wrong! All our pictures are posted on our Class Wiki, if you want to see, but here are a couple of examples.

Jake

Catherine

Here we are, being busy techno-bees.


We have two new projects happening in our classroom. The first one is a wiki about Easter Traditions. We've asked some other classes from around the world about the things they do at Easter time and they're going to put in on our wiki. So far, we have classes in Canada, India, Russia, Thailand, America, Poland and the Ukraine participating and Mrs N has asked some more too. We'll be putting up information about  Easter in Australia as well.

Our other project is for Earth Day. We want to find out what other classes are doing to help the environment, so we've made another wiki for them to share with us.

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

A Message for Classes who Read our Blog

Earth Day is coming up soon! We're celebrating it on April 22nd. The Smarties were wondering if there are any classes who read this blog, who would like to participate in a small Earth Day project.

We want you to share with us what you're doing to mark the occasion. Maybe you will be:

• cleaning up the school or area around it
• doing craft with recycled materials
• organising a recycling project at your school
• turning off the lights and power for the day
• educating the school community about an environmental issue
• organising a toy or book swap at school, or
• planting some trees or native plants

Whatever you're going to do, we'd love to hear about it.

Teachers can contact Mrs N (email details in the sidebar) and she'll add you to our Earth Day wiki, so you can put your activities there. Wouldn't it be interesting to see what other children around the world are doing to help look after the Earth that we all share?

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N