Category Archives: Uncategorized

Genius Hour

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We’ve had our first Genius Hour session for Term 3. Everyone was really motivated and they were deeply involved in their learning from the minute we started.

We had some people cooking for the first time – they were very organised. They shared the responsibility of bringing different materials, checking off their checklists that they had everything they needed and took turns during each part of the cooking process. We all loved being able to taste test the finished products!

We had people continue to make arcade games using materials such as cardboard, pop sticks and plasticine. We saw a great game of soccer and basketball made for other classmates to use.

Some students made structure models, following up on our inquiry topic from Term 2.

One group have started to create a collage each, using natural materials that they collected from the grounds of our school.

Our budding artists, Lauren and Lara, had a fantastic time creating their first art masterpiece on a real canvas – well done girls! Great team work.

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Setting up a worm farm

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The 3 Year 2 classes are learning about sustainability through different inquiry tasks relating to plants – their needs, the parts of plants, varieties of plants and how we care of the environment. We had helpers from each of our classes to create the worm farm and then they are reporting back to their classes to explain how we set up the worm farm.

We have made a worm farm so we can see how worms use our food scraps to create compost and worm wee. We can then use the worm wee to fertilise our garden beds in the ELC (Environmental Learning Centre).

We followed a procedure to make the worm farm.

First, we made some mulch by soaking a mulch brick in some water overnight.

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Then we put the mulch into the worm farm and Jessica ripped up newspaper to add to the mulch. (Worms love to live in mulch and newspaper.)

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Next we opened the box of worms and added them to the mulch/ newspaper mix.

 

 

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Using our hands we carefully mixed the worms into the mulch mixture.

 

 

 

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Finally, we added some food scraps so the worms had something to eat.

 

 

 

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We need to make sure our worm farm stays cool – worms die if they get hot. We need to add food scraps like banana skins, apple cores and other fruit and vegetable scraps. We won’t add any citrus scraps (lemon, mandarine or orange) as worms don’t like them and they don’t rot into the mulch mixture.

 

 

 

 

SRC Reps

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As we start Semester 2 we have elected new representatives for our Student Representative Council (SRC).

Congratulations to Lauren and Coby our new reps!

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Our back up reps are Matilda and Oz – congratulations to them too.

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It was wonderful to see 8 students nominate themselves to make a speech to our class and explain why they felt they would be a good rep for our class. We look forward to these students representing our class at meetings with Mr Warncken and the other class reps.

Little Athletics Visit

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Today we had a fantastic session with Daniel from Little Athletics. He taught us how to do the high jump and many of the warm up activities that lead to each of us being able to jump safely onto the mat. We did lots of running and stretching to warm up our leg muscles. Then Daniel explained how to run up to the mat and then jump over the elastic rope used in high jump. We gave us lots of turns at jumping over the rope and we loved every minute of it.  We were lucky enough to receive a wristband, a certificate and and information pamphlet explaining times that Little athletics starts in Term 4.

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Structures Inquiry

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This week we’ve had an exciting challenge for Sharing Time.

Our topics for the week was:  Create a structure that helps our community.

This was a great chance for every student to create their own structure, based upon the information we’ve already learnt during our inquiry. Structures needed to be stable, could use a bird’s eye view, could be a 3D model and be made of any materials that we had – we had a strong focus on recycling materials.

We have a huge array of buildings presented to the class. They were:

  • Cafe on Wheels – it drives to people in the community who need good, healthy meals
  • Minecraft House – for the homeless
  • a homeless shelter
  • a food bank – which can help people who can’t afford food
  • a hospital
  • a house
  • a CAFE – people can afford to pay for their meal or you’re given food if you can’t afford to pay this time or pay it forwards
  • a hospital to look after sick people
  • an apartment for the homeless
  • Tower -The Harley Kalifa – series any food you’d like and has rooms available for the homeless
  • a hotel – to attract tourists to your town and then they spend money which is good for the town
  • Rainbow House for the homeless
  • a hotel for the homeless- anyone can stay if they need shelter for the night
  • a train station – public transport is important for lots of people in the community to move around the city easily and it takes more cars off the roads so there’s less pollution
  • a pyramid- shelter on a hot day in the desert
  • a pet hospital – takes care of sick or injured animals and also gives them a holiday area when their families are on a break
  • the Extreme Hotel – it’s an extremely small hotel used for people who need shelter for a night
  • a group of pyramids – good for beauty and tourism and encourages people to visit your community
  • a carpark and vet centre for animals – lots of people can park their car in 1 building and drop their pets off at a centre to be exercised and looked after
  • a tower – great for tourism
  • a wine centre – great for tourism
  • a shopping tunnel – an underground tunnel to collect shopping that you’ve bought online
  • a vet/ shopping centre and hotel – great for tourism.
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Genius Hour

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On Friday our class had the first full session of self directed Genius Hour time.

We’ve watched lots of different YouTube clips relating to Genius Hour, looked for ideas on Pinterest, used Google to search about different topics and had some specific challenges, like the what’s in the paper bag, newspaper and cardboard challenges.

We listed what we’re passionate about and areas we’d like to investigate.

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We planned our ideas and worked out if we’re working by ourselves or with a partner/ small group. We had a real mixture of ideas: making a Minecraft movie, creating straw constructions, gardening, making cardboard arcade games (like Caine’s Arcade), pottery, pop stick models – just to name a few!

Our class planner:

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We sent notes home to our families explaining Genius Hour and asked for recycled materials that we could use during our sessions. Here’s just some of the materials that arrived on Friday morning.

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Here’s some photos of our busy busy busy making time.

 

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Here are many of our finished creations.

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National Reconciliation Week

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It is National Reconciliation Week from 27th May – 3rd June.

This is a very important time in Australia, when we  celebrate indigenous history and culture in Australia and foster reconciliation discussion and activities. We’ve had a wonderful week of learning about Reconciliation Week activities. We’ve loved listening to a huge variety of Dreaming Stories, creating postcards about reconciliation with our Big Buddies and creating Art works for our room.

There will be a very special assembly next Friday at school to look at a dot painting donated to our school and to hear about the different reconciliation activities done by all of the classes in our school.

We looked at the traditional structures used by Aboriginals and related it to our current inquiry unit about Structures. We went outdoors to collect sticks, twigs, branches, leaves, grasses and gum nuts to create different structures. We had a fantastic time working together outdoors – we think our structures look pretty good too! What do you think?

Reconciliation Week on PhotoPeach

What was one of your favourite things from our Reconciliation Week tasks?

National Simultaneous Storytime Day

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Today is the National Simultaneous Storytime. Every year a picture book, written and illustrated by an Australian author and illustrator is read simultaneously in libraries, schools, pre-schools, childcare centres, family homes, bookshops and many other places around the country. The story chosen for this years event is the The Brothers Quibble by Aaron Blabley.

Here is the author Aaron Blabey reading his story.
https://youtu.be/YqmY4zJl4Ds

What did you think of the story?