Catching Up!

This is a catch-up post about some of the things that have been happening lately! We'll get back to posting more regularly again now.

At the end of last term, we were sad to say goodbye to Miss J, our student teacher, who left us to go back to university. We had lots of fun with her and learned all sorts of great things! She has a job for next year already and we think her class will be very lucky to have her! Hopefully, she'll be back to visit us before the end of the year.

We've just had two weeks holiday. Most of us had lots of fun, except for Amy, who had to stay in hospital for part of it! She's all better now, so that's good news. Some of the things we did in the holidays were: going to the movies, riding bikes, going camping, having sleep-overs and playing computer games. This term, we only have eight and a half weeks of school before our time in Year 2 is up! That time is going to go so fast and soon it'll be Summer holidays.

This term, we're learning all about old things, like dinosaurs and fossils. On Wednesday, we're taking a trip in a bus to go and visit the museum. They have a display of all sorts of things to do with dinosaurs and we can't wait to see it!

We did some dinosaur art last week. We learned that some people think that the dinosaurs became extinct (which means they all died) because really big meteors (rocks from outer space) hit Earth. In our pictures, we drew a meteor with oil pastels, then painted the background with water colours. After tracing and cutting some dinosaur silhouettes in black, we glued them onto the background. They look fantastic hanging up in our classroom.

We also made some dinosaur fossils. Everyone received a piece of clay and then we picked out a little toy dinosaur. We made the clay into a flat circle shape, then pressed the dinosaur into it. When we pulled it out, we could see the imprint of the dinosaur. They look really cool! We painted them today with brown and black paints to make them look like they'd just been dug out of the ground. Maybe we'll see some real fossils at the museum!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

A Visit to the Park

We went on an excursion today! As we've been learning all about the Noongar seasons, we visited a special park that has a display all about them. Each season has a wooden pole and special things about the season, such as foods, or plants that are common at that time of year, are carved into the wood. There was also a really great playground too. We ate our morning tea on the grass, then had a play! It was a really fun visit.

The Smarties with Miss J, our practising teacher

At our school, every class has an Italian language lesson each week with Signora L. She taught us a song to help us learn the names of body parts. It's a song you might already know the English version of - Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes!

  Italian Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes by thesmarties

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Verbs, Pears, Shapes and Seasons

We've been learning about verbs. A verb is a word used to describe an action. Words like run, eat, play, sleep and bounce are all examples of verbs. During spelling groups today, some of us played an online verb game, which was really fun. We needed to read the words in the balloons and tap on them if they were verbs.

This week for Monday Munchies we tasted delicious, crunchy, sweet, juicy pears! They were absolutely yummy! When we cut them in half, we noticed small black seeds inside. Pears can be eaten like an apple, leaving the core and the seeds behind. Some people like to cook pears and have them as a dessert with ice-cream too.

We're really good at identifying two-dimensional shapes, like rectangles, rhombuses, hexagons and triangles, so now we're learning about three-dimensional shapes! 3D shapes are not flat if you put them on a table. They have three dimensions - length, width and height. We created cubes and learned that they have 8 corners and 6 faces. Some examples of cubes are dice and boxes with square faces. Here's a website that explains the difference between two and three dimensional shapes.

We all know about the seasons called Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter, but we didn't know that the Noongar people have their own seasons too! With Miss J and Mrs P's help, we learned about them today. The aboriginal people in this area have six seasons, each lasting around two months. The food they hunt and gather and where they live are determined by the seasons. In a few weeks, we're going on an excursion to learn more about the Noongar seasons. Here are the names of the seasons and the months they cover. Sometimes, the spelling might be a little bit different.

Birak - December & January
Bunuru - February & March
Djeran - April & May
Makuru - June & July
Djilba - August & September
Kambarang - October & November

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Counting in Noongar

Our school is located in the south-west of Australia, where the aboriginal people are called Noongar. It is also the name of their language. We've started learning some Noongar words, with the help of our Aboriginal Teacher Assistant, Mrs P. So far, we've learned how to count to ten!

 Noongar Numbers by thesmarties

one - keyen

two - koodjal

three - dambart

four - koodjal koodjal

five - maar

six - maar-keyen

seven - maar-koodjal

eight - maar-dambart

nine - maar-koodjal koodjal

ten - maar-maar

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

A New Smartie!

We have a brand new Smartie! His name is Cole and he started at our school this week. He already knew Taj from playing football, but he's making lots of friends with the other children in our class and is enjoying being at our school.

This week in spelling groups, we're revising the sounds we've been learning over the last four weeks. Today, we played games to give us some extra practice in a fun way! We were learning about short and long vowel sounds, words that have ch, sh or wh at the beginning, words with oar, ore, or and wor, and words ending with cher, ture, ure and cher. Here are some pictures of us practising our spelling.

Our school choir entered a competition today. Tatiana, Jenaya, Anastacia, Makayla, Paige and Cathy all hopped on a bus after recess and travelled to the competition. They're getting back after school finishes, so we're not sure how they went, but we bet they were great! Some of them were a bit nervous before they left, but maybe they were just really, really excited.

The Smarties members of the school choir

We did a fun little art activity today. We made elephants pictures. Mrs N gave us a line drawing of an elephant on a piece of paper. We needed to look through magazines and find pictures that we liked in nice bright colours. We glued them onto the back of the elephant, making sure we covered it all. To check whether we'd left any white spaces, we held our pictures up to the window and the sunlight made it really easy to see through. Once we'd covered the elephant, we cut it out, then added the ear, tusk and tail using the typed part of the magazines. We think they look really great hanging in a long row in our classroom, almost like they're walking in a line!

Creating our elephants

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Book Week Dress Ups!

What an exciting day we had at school today! It's Book Week and everyone got to dress up as their favourite book character. There are so many amazing characters in books, it was difficult to choose our favourites! It was lots and lots of fun, especially during assembly when we went up the front and told the whole school who we were dressed as. Thanks to our mums and dads for helping us with our costumes.

Our rain sticks are finished! They took a long time to get done, because we had to leave them to dry between each layer of paper mache and paint. We decorated them with feathers, beads, coloured string and metallic pens and we're really happy with them.

We are becoming experts on the water cycle. We understand that water is constantly moving around the cycle and it doesn't really have a beginning or an end point. We created water cycle collages to show how well we understand it. There were lots of big words for us to learn, but Mrs N says we did an excellent job remembering them all!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Cystic Fibrosis Wacky Hair Day

Last Friday, our school had a Wacky Hair Day to raise money for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. Paige, one of the Smarties, has CF so our class organised it in her honour. She wrote about what it's like to have it and read it out in front of the whole school at assembly. Here's what she wrote:

CF is short for Cystic Fibrosis, but little kids called it "sixty five roses". Part of my daily treatment is taking tablets every time I eat. I also spend up to one hour a day doing physio and have lots of time in hospital where I have to have lots of needles and pricks, but not all of it is bad.


I get to eat junk food like chips, chocolate and cheese all the time. I also get to meet nice people at hospital. I got to go to the Gold Coast when I was six, organised  by Make-a-Wish. They understand how hard it is having to do so much treatment and it was good to go to the theme parks. I still had to do all my physio and take tablets, but it was still fun.


I will always have to take tablets and do nebs and physio to stay healthy because there isn't a cure for CF. Danica wants to grow up and be a medical scientist and find a cure for Cystic Fibrosis. I think she'll be able to do it.

We showed the whole school a video that explains what CF is and how it effects the people who have it. We've seen the video before but thought it would be good for everyone to see it so they could understand why we were raising money.

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N