Science Week

Posted on August 30, 2015 by lisasporn

As a part of our Sharing Time topics we challenged our students to bring along a ‘simple Science experiment’ to share with the class. They needed to be very well prepared to have all of the materials they needed, know the order of the steps to complete their experiment and be able to explain the Science in their experiment.

WOW!!! Everyone in the class did an amazing job presenting their Science experiment. We had a huge variety of experiments presented like:

chemical reactions like – Mentos in a bottle of Coke, detergents separating fats in milk, lava lamp, volcanoes – the reaction of pouring vinegar over bicarbonate soda
shrinking a potato
a tornado in a bottle
a lava lamp – showing how oil and water never mix but creating bubbles with an aspirin tablet.
using water to stretch scrunched paper
spinning eggs – which spins or wobbles a boiled egg or raw egg
bending a burning match
a pendulum swing – showing the forces used with different weighted pendulums
a wave in a bottle
colour travelling up flowers – showing how plants carry water up stems to leaves and petals
a balloon rocket -releasing air from a balloon to move it along string
testing an eggs float-ablity!

It was great to see and hear everyone clearly explain their experiments and they were all really well prepared. Many of the students had procedures written down or copied which linked to our procedure writing focus perfectly.

Well done to everyone!

Book week Dress Up Day

Posted on August 29, 2015 by lisasporn

As a part of our Bookweek celebrations each student in our class was asked to bring along a book to share and read with a small group.

This was an exciting opportunity to share a book that each student loved and was important to them. We had quite a large variety of books brought in – picture books, novels, non fictions texts – all very special to each person.

Everyone read their books with confidence and in a clear way – we loved hearing why their books were important to them.

Open Night

Posted on August 29, 2015 by lisasporn

On Tuesday night we held our annual Open Night. This is a wonderful night for all of our families and friends to visit every classroom or learning area. Classrooms had different activities around:

Technology – using Scratch for coding and showing other ways we enhance learning through the use of laptops and iPads
Mathematics – showing different numeracy tasks used in classes
Inquiry – what are our latest inquiry topics and looking at our investing skills
and showing any learning that’s been a priority in each classroom.

Families were encouraged to collect a passport and collect stamps from different classrooms and the Library, Garden Centre, the German room and the Gym. This was an easy and fun way to encourage our families to visit lots of different places around he school.

It was lovely to see many of the families from our class and chat with them. Our students were amazing tour guides – showing their families around and explaining all of the activities that were set up.

Here’s some of the families visiting our room:

Earth Art

Posted on August 20, 2015 by lisasporn

Today was such a lovely day (after a grey and dreary Winter) and so we headed outside to create some Earth Art pieces. We collected leaves, blossoms, bark, stones, gravel, sticks, flower petals, bark chips, sand, dirt and anything else we could find. We worked with a partner and discussed what we’d like to create and then we got started.

We loved sharing each groups creations and thought they looked wonderful – each of them was very different but showed lots of thought and great thinking.

We’d love to know what you think of our Earth Art creations – please post a comment.

What are we reading today?

Posted on August 17, 2015 by lisasporn

Today as a part of our Daily 5 reading we did ‘read to self’. It’s one of our favourite reading tasks at the moment as we have lots of people in our class reading longer books or novels and they enjoy having long periods of time to really enjoy the story they’re reading.

Here’s what we were reading today.

What are some books that you like to read and tell us why. We’re always on the look out for new, interesting books to read.

Today’s Future Sound

Posted on August 13, 2015 by lisasporn

Today we were very lucky to have 2 special visitors in our classroom.

They were Elliot and Alex from Today’s Future Sound which is a nonprofit teaching music production, media literacy, using as mental health and edu intervention for underserved youth in Bay Area/LA school+community settings. They are from San Francisco in the USA.

Elliot and Alex are visiting Australia at the moment and have worked in many of our capital cities already. They’re visiting Adelaide for a couple of days – working in different schools and with teachers.

We had lots of fun learning lots of exciting new music making skills – we looked at different DJ’s who use different techniques to mix and create their music, YouTube clips showing their music in a variety of dance clips filmed all around the world AND the best part was we created some music with them. The classes were divided into 3 different groups to ‘play’ different parts of the song and then we used their digital equipment to record our own song – an original!

If you’re interested in learning more about what Alex and Elliot do check out:

Their website :

Today’s Future Sound

Their Instagram account:

https://instagram.com/p/6T9LRtooJZ/?tagged=todaysfuturesound

Their twitter account:

@TFS_beats

Their Facebook page

https://www.facebook.com/todaysfuturesound?fref=ts

Maths – Learning about time.

Posted on August 11, 2015 by lisasporn

This week we’ve begun investigations about ‘time”.

Our learning goals for ‘time’ are:

telling the time using o’clock, 1/2 past, 1/4 past and 1/4 to
using an analogue clock
using a digital clock
converting analogue times to digital times or the reverse
comparing units of measurement for time – seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, fortnights, months, years, centuries.

Today we were given a challenge – working with a partner count out 60 counters, put them in a 5 pattern around a hoop, number the patterns and see what you’ve created (shhhhh it’s a clock!).

Bookweek Performance

Posted on August 11, 2015 by lisasporn

Today we attended a Bookweek performance called The Book Show by Splash theatre company. The theme for Bookweek 2015 is Books Light Up Our World. The performance was lots of fun and gave us an insight into some of the shortlisted books for this years competition.

Deep reading time

Posted on August 11, 2015 by lisasporn

Today we changed our partner reading session – just to keep things interesting!

We used our non0-fiction texts that relate to our inquiry unit about livings things – their needs and what our responsibilities are in looking after them.

We looked for the different features of a non fiction text:

We LOVED reading with our partners and learning so much new information about living things, plants and their needs. So many of our questions from the Wondering Wall were answered -as well as had us thinking about new questions to add.

We really enjoyed using non fiction texts for partner reading and we LOVED having a long reading session to really take time to read different texts.

Inquiry – Dream Gardens

Posted on August 9, 2015 by lisasporn

Our current Inquiry unit is about sustainability. We are investigating lots of different areas: learning about different plants, what plants need to survive, how plants grow and learning about our responsibilities when caring for the environment.

One of our learning tasks was to create a ‘dream garden’ and to explain your choices.

We had lots of very interesting gardens that would supply food for families and communities, special features for fun, different varieties of plants and animals were also included.

Many of the students created posters which are on display in our classroom and some chose to create their dream garden using the Minecraft app or website. It was fantastic to see and hear how these students created their very detailed dream gardens.

Here are just a few photos of their creations.

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