I hope everyone enjoys their 2 weeks holiday. Stay safe and have lots of fun.
See you in 2 weeks – Miss Sporn
Monthly Archives: June 2012
Congratulations Cooper!
Today we had our regular Mathletics session using the laptops. Sarah was logging onto the website when she noticed Cooper F was in the top 100 students in the world!! WOW! Cooper had been answering so many questions that he was 62nd in the world at answering Mathletics questions today. Congratulations Cooper – what an amazing achievement!
The Reading Goes On!!
Every morning we read!!!
We LOVE to read. Here’s some photos of us working on developing our reading skills. We’re using the Daily 5 Reading Cafe and have started to make our own daily reading choices and setting our own reading goals on what we’d like to improve! Some of the areas we have chosen to develop are:
- increasing fluency
- checking for understanding
- improving our decoding skills
- back up and re-read
- flip the sound
- use the pictures/ diagrams as clues and see if they match the pictures
- read with expression
- read at a steady pace
- predict what will happen next
We’re using lots of technology to develop our reading skills, like iPads, iPhones, computers and the Interactive Whiteboard.
Some of our students have really found series of books they love. From our book sales we’ve spread the word about different books that others may like but have never heard of. Lucy, Maisie and Emma are loving the Bindi and animal novels, Will and Oscar are enjoying the Dirty Bertie novels, Rory and Nathan are enjoying Dairy of a Wimpy Kid and Ned has just discovered the Famous Five books after reading some Roald Dahl novels. Lots of our students are discovering “good fit books” everyday. Mrs Langham and Amelia, in the Library, have been really supportive and helpful to find new books and reserve books we are interested in- we’re lucky to have their support!
Here’s one of this week’s reading sessions.
Daily 5 Reading Cafe on PhotoPeach
Daily 5 Reading Cafe on PhotoPeach
We also have a “new read to self” record – we can read for 36min & 17seconds without anyone moving or being distracted – hoooooorrrrayyyyyy!!!! We had to stop at 36minutes because we needed to move onto a different activity.
What are some books that you think we might enjoy? We’d love to hear your ideas and suggestions.
Even More Bucket Filling
Today we re-read “Have You Filled a Bucket Today?” We’ve actually re-read it lots of times because we just love it!
We had a special “bucket filling session” and spent about 20 minutes filling other people’s buckets. We have been doing lots of bucket filling over the last few weeks.
We’ve found lots of resources on the Internet about Bucket Filling and have included a photo of a template some of us used today – but we still LOVE making our own notes for our friends.
Here are photos of our latest bucket filling session.
Have You Filled a Bucket Today? on PhotoPeach
Assembly Awards
We’d like to say congratulations to Trent, Layla and Cooper for receiving awards at our assembly this week. Great work guys!
Line Designs with Shading
Over the last few weeks we have been working on a shading Art activity. By carefully drawing and colouring (shading) our line designs our 2D pictures became 3D. The children became really excited as their colour work developed and their pictures really became 3 dimensional! We found this activity on this amazing Art website called Teach Kids Art.
3D Shading Art work on PhotoPeach
What do you think of our Art works?
Phil Cummings Author Visit
Today our class had a very special visitor. It was an author called Phil Cummings. He has written over 70 books and is from South Australia. Phil came to talk with us about what it’s like to be an author – where he gets his ideas/ inspirations, all the steps that go into writing a book, when he likes to write ( at 2 AM ), how he works with his publishers to get his ideas into a book, how he works with illustrators and so much more.
Phil is an amazing storyteller! We LOVED listening to Phil tell us how he got lots of the ideas behind his stories. He used different voices, facial expressions and hand gestures to really make his stories come alive!
We’re really looking forward to reading lots of his books – best of all our Library has most of his books. Lots of them will be a “good fit” book.
Here are some photos of Phil reading one of his stories.
New Garden Development
Today a new garden area was finished by the gardeners. It is next to the lower courts, that were resurfaced, and it has rocks, new trees, shrubs and native grasses planted. There are also gravel paths through the whole garden area.
Our class thought it looked great. Here’s a couple of photos we took today.
Jelly Cam – Our Day
Today Miss Sporn set up her laptop with Jelly Cam running for the entire school day. Jelly Cam is set that it takes 1 photo every 10 seconds and then joins those photos together to make it into a movie.
You will notice how our day has run.
Our Friday routine was:
- come into the classroom and get ready for the day
- using laptops to publish narrative stories
- fruit time and sharing time
- recess
- getting our readers and book boxes ready for buddy class reading outdoors
- buddy spelling test
- going to Library for borrowing and browsing
- lunch
- coming after lunch and reading Witches – our class novel
- leaving the room to play “Water and Ice” in the gym
- free time for 15 minutes
- packing up for the end of the day and getting ready to go home
- leaving for home!
Here was our day.
Untitled from Lisa Sporn on Vimeo.
Book Sale!
Today we held our very first book sale!
The students were asked to bring along a book that they would like to “sell” to the class. Obviously we didn’t actually sell our books for money BUT this book sale was about advertising and promoting books you’ve liked to others in the class.
The children had a week to decided which books they would like to “sell” to their classmates and had to decide what would make others interested in reading a new book. We’ve noticed that we all like to read but sometimes we get stuck reading the same series of books or the same type of stories.
A book sale is a great way to introduce readers to different kinds of books – maybe some that they wouldn’t have thought to read before.
We had 6 very brave people who joined our very first book sale. They were Emma, Lucy, Sarah, Oscar, Nathan and Maisie. Each of these student talked about a different book or in some cases they couldn’t pick just one book and brought a few along. Thanks to the 6 fantastic students who had a go at our very first book sale – we were impressed with your talks. Emma had even written notes to help her speak in a clear way to us.
These students talked about:
- what the story was about
- who it would be a “good fit book” for
- what made it an interesting story
- who might like it
- the pictures matching the words
- if it was part of a series of books
- who the author was
- where the book came from – the school library or our community library
- and lots of other information.
Here are some photos of the presenters – congratulations guys on a wonderful booksale.
Our audience loved hearing about these books and are going to find them in the Library at school or our Community Library.
Book Sale on PhotoPeach
What books can you recommend for our class to try reading? We’d love to hear about some new titles.