Computers and Prezis

Now that we've spent a number of weeks researching and taking notes on an animal of our choice we have begun putting all that information together. Some chose 'prezis' as their tool and others stuck with what they know best which is a Power Point presentation.

Grandparents Day

What a wonderful sense of community! We had many grandparents visit our school today and watch our talented students perform in front of them. We started with performances by Kindergarten, year one and two before there was the band, the junior and senior choirs and a special performance by 4/5C. We were part of the last song which was an alternate school song. All of year 3, 4, 5 and 6 performed at the end of the concert. After the concert there was time for grandparents to visit classrooms and then the library where they were able to purchase a book. Our classroom was buzzing with grandparents and parents and younger siblings. What a truly wonderful day! Here we are waiting for the concert to begin.

The concert items were fabulous!

Katija: I really enjoyed having my grandparents at school even though I'm going to see them Friday and I saw them yesterday. I liked the play by 4/5C. I liked that Sam was the leader and then ripped off his t-shirt and then was one of the boredom busters.

Keira: I liked when Sam said, 'I want to be myself, but famous!'. Callum then went over and said, 'Can I have your autograph?' and then he said, 'Selfie!'. I liked the junior choir and how they sung their song, 'Ten Feet off the ground'. I really liked how the Kindys sang the greeting song. I really just liked all of it.

More maths...

Maths is great! We tried some mental computation and problem solving today with dominoes and dice. Great work and lots of fun!

Measuring up

Keira:

On Monday we did maths that included the trundle wheels. The trundle wheels click every metre as you push them. We had to measure the basketball court, the handball court, the dodgeball court and the black asphalt. We had to name the area, then estimate the perimeter and then measure theactual  court and write it down in a table in metres. I thought it was fun measuring outside with the trundle wheels.

Athletics Carnival 2015

The Athletics Carnival was held on Thursday last week at Dunbar park. There was so much anticipation as we lead up to the day. We had the opportunity to do the discus and shotput prior to the day with the help of Sam. During the day we ran in our heats and some of us made it to the recording table where I was stationed throughout the day. There were many lovely 3/4T faces that made it to the recording table where they held tightly onto the coloured plactic marker which let us know their place in their race.

What a lovely day it ended up being after rather a cold start. The canteen was kept busy and I know many students visited the year six icy-pole station to help them with their fundraising efforts by eating as many ice-poles as they could.

We arrived back at school just after the bell looking very tired.

Fabulous Friday

Katija: I had a good day today. My favourite bit was when we went to the computer room. I wrote a story about Hop the easter bunny. We did science and had to do a survey about four trees. We had to take photos of them with an iPad.

Madison: I had a very good day. It was the best day at this school. My favourite bit was when my class went in the computer room and published some of our stories. 

Charlie: Today I had to do a survey about trees in our school to find the gum trees. We then had to take photos of them using an iPad to find evidence of insects and animals. I really enjoyed publishing my story on the computer. I liked having 'Taylor Time' this afternoon where we got to play with photo booth on the iPads and do drawing.

Working hard

We've been working hard this week and have settled back into school and our normal routines. The week began with us catching up with our shotput which we weren't able to finish last week because of the rain. The afternoon then had us enjoying our first gymnastics lesson which everyone loved. The equipment was great and we worked hard at the different skills we were practicing. I watched everyone's trampoline jumps and their landings. We had smiles all round while performing skills on the different equipment.

We continued with our HSIE unit, 'People and their Beliefs' and came up with some questions we have about different cultures and religions. Liam asked why we don't just have one religion. Much deep thinking went into the questions that we ended up with and that we'll answer over the term.

Our science unit, 'Among the Gumtrees' begun with us first singing along to 'Among the gumtrees' and 'Kookaburra sings in an old gum tree'. We then spoke about what a 'survey' is, as we will be doing our own survey tomorrow. We thought about the surveys we have done and the surveys our families have taken part in. Surveys have questions that need answering. The answers or data is then put together to learn something. We will be doing a survey on trees in our school on Friday. The purpose of our survey is to identify which trees are gum trees and which are not. We will also be looking at what sort of animals and insects we might find on gum trees. We spoke about the 'evidence' that we might see that will tell us that animals or insects live there. We thought about what sort of evidence we might see and came up with a long list of: droppings, eaten leaves, bird and ant nests, spider webs and scratchings on bark. Tomorrow we will be taking photos of our findings and then analyse the data from our surveys too. We will be little scientists this Friday!

A visit to the library had us choosing our novel for this term. We had a look at novels that interested us and then checked them with me before getting Mrs Paull to scan them out. We have begun to read them already and will be practicing some of the comprehension skills we learnt in term 1 and 2. That will be making predictions about what will happen next, making connections with the text, summarising sections of our novel, visualising parts of our novel through drawings, monitoring our understanding of the vocabulary and language used in the novel and asking questions. We will be learning about 'author's craft' as a class. This means learning to critically view and respond to a novel by looking into the author's mind and trying to understand the workings and intentions of the author. It will also help us as writers ourselves!

During writing lessons we have been learning about information reports, what they are and where we find them. We know that they are informative writing and are filled with facts. So we have begun researching an animal to find our own facts online. We will then write that information into our own words which should end up as our first information reports. 

We're learning about visual literacy this term and have already been learning words like, 'vector' and 'salience' and how the artists that draw and paint the images in our picture books do so with meaning. We are going to learn how to 'read' pictures. We already read pictures all the time. Everytime we see a sign that doesn't use words but rather symbols we are reading pictures. It is known as environmental print. We brainstormed the sorts of signs we read everyday and came up with this list: no smoking, watch out for children, falling rocks, hospital or first-aid crosses, poison, emojis, handicapped parking and of course the golden arches. We will continue to learn many new terms to help us read images this term.

Our buddy time this week involved using air dry clay to create 3 dimensional insects. We had looked at information books about insects with our buddies last term and then drew the insect that we were the most interested in. Working with the clay was tiring for our small hands. We had to knead the clay to make it pliable and then work quickly with our buddies to create our insects. They will dry over the weekend and next week we will paint them. It has been a great way to get to know our buddy and we've really had fun at the same time.

Wow! We really are working hard at our learning!