Fun with water

We are learning about capacity using coloured water. What fun! Makes estimating and measuring with liters and milliliters engaging and very wet!

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.

Mad Monday

This morning we had a book club meeting where we had to mark each others' effort, completition of work, participation and neatness of work. It was great to see some of our groups complete their roles: discussion director (writes thoughtful questions to discuss), summariser (writes a summary of the part of the book that was read), word wizard (finds interesting words or words that they don't know the meaning of and finds the definitions of them for their group) and the literary luminary (they find an interesting passage in the book to share and explain why they chose it. eg. change of setting, funny, important plot development).

Others are slowly learning each of these roles and are developing the ability to listen and share their thoughts and opinions.

After maths group we continued with our pen pal letters which are almost finished. This is the third letter we have received from our pen pals and we are really starting to get to know who our friends are.

Graphing can occassionally be a little bit of a dry subject but since I bought some smarties to liven the lesson up with and made everyone graph their container of smarties there has been great enthusiasm in completing their column graphs.

This afternoon we will be writing a narrative that we will end up giving to our pen pals. We are going to start today and hopefully edit it. When we get to publish it we have little booklets I made for the stories to be written in. What a great way to share our fabulous story writing!

Half way through...

Week 6 and an introduction to a new comprehension strategy - questioning. Good readers use questioning to help clarify their understanding. We played a game as a class where we read short paragraphs and had to ask questions to unlock the door to the castle. We went room to room asking and answering questions to unlock doors and find more information.

After our game we worked with a partner reading articles and using a question chart to create questions about the articles we were working on. We have to wait until tomorrow to share our work as we had to rush and pack up so that we could meet our buddies for 'Clean up Australia Day' in our school. We worked with a buddy to pick up rubbish in our designated areas. Many hands make light work and before you knew it the playground was spotless!

Number groups and then some HSIE where we looked at some of the wars that Australia has been involved in. We talked about World War 1 and how the landing in Gallipoli was a part of this war. We also looked at the Vietnam War and discovered which countries were involved. We visited Google Maps and explored the different places that we had spoken about. Some of us wanted to know why we would be involved in wars of places so far away from us. We spoke about the British Empire and how in WW1 many Australians felt a strong connection to the mother country (England) and wanted to not only fight for the 'Britsh Empire' but also for Australia.

The afternoon was spent looking at persuasive texts and planning out our arguments for convincing Mrs Taylor to let us sit next to a friend in class. We then had to elaborate on these arguments. This week we will look at using a hook as an introduction to our exposition. We talked about using a hook to grab the reader's attention and listened to examples of different hooks. Eg. Beginning with a question, an exaggeration, an idiom, onomatopoeia or by painting a picture. 

We finished a very busy and productive day with some graphing and chance work. 

Tomorrow we need to finish our penpal letters and send them to the school we have formed a partnership with in Shell Cove. There have been some very keen children asking about what is happening with our penpals and I've finally been able to say that we're going ahead! Very exciting!

Busy little bees!

What a busy day today. We continued looking at connections this morning and got into groups where we took turns reading to each other and discussing connections that we could make with the text. We then had to write down what the connection was and what type it was. I got to listen to half the class read to me and they learnt how much I like to take notes while they read. They did a fabulous job remembering to make their voices sound interesting and smooth and go back and re-read something if it didn't make sense. I was impressed! We got back together to share our connections and talk about the difference between a small connection and a deeper connection. Everyone managed to make a connection with one of the books their group looked at.

After reading groups we looked at common nouns. What are they? We worked out that most of what you can see with your eyes are common nouns. Eg. book, board, carpet, pencil, tote tray, windown. We also talked about Proper nouns and why they use a capital letter. We know that we're important and that is why we have a capital letter at the beginning of our names. After sharing the common nouns we knew, we worked in our grammar text books and before we knew it was time to pack up for recess.

Number groups followed shortly after recess. There were only a few reminders about what rooms to go to and then followed a good hour of maths. Too soon maths was over and it was time for some HSIE. We talked about what we knew about ANZAC day and made a great list that included the what the poppy represents, where ANZAC biscuits come from, the story of Simpson's donkey and a couple more. Some of us knew about family members that had fought in wars and were keen to share what they knew with the class.

The afternoon included writing the rest of our stories, marking our grammar work, reading some of our class novel, skip counting and tables practice and our end of the day jar question.

I'm looking forward to reading lots of interesting stories!