We’d like to wish all of our Year 3, 5 and 7 students all the best for their NAPLAN assessments.
Remember – just try to do your best!
Here’s a special surprise for our Year 3 students as they finish their tests.
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Happy Mother’s Day
We’d like to wish all of our wonderful Mums a wonderful Mother’s Day!
We hope you have a lovely day and enjoy the presents we’ve made and bought for you. Look out we’re going to spoil you today.
Mother’s Day 2014 on PhotoPeach
Mother’s Day 2014 on PhotoPeach
Jackie French Visit
Today we all met the famous Australian author Jackie French. We LOVED learning all about her books and her special interest in wombats. She told us some amazing stories about the wombats that live near her home and how her experiences with wombats has lead to them featuring in many of her books. Jackie has written over 160 books for people of all ages.
We learned lots of important messages about books and reading from Jackie. Some of them were:
- read lots of different books – ’til you find topics you just love
- read as much as possible
- share your books with others
- talk about the books you love to read
- borrow lots of books from the Library
- ‘taste’ lots of different styles and topics in books – you’ll find just the right ‘flavoured’ one for you!
- read read read and read!!!
Today’s visit also happened to be National Hairy Nose Day and we all wore our wombat whiskers to celebrate the day. Jackie thought we all looked amazing and was really impressed with our whiskers.
Here are photos of us with our whiskers on:
Jackie French Visit
Tomorrow we are very excited to have the author Jackie French visit our school. Jackie has written many books and we’ve loved reading lots of them at school. Jackie loves to write children’s fiction books and gardening books. One of her favourite topics is wombats and she has written many books about them or had them as main characters in her stories. She id the director of the wombat foundation. When Jackie visits our school it happens to be National Hairy Nose Day – wear whiskers for wildlife day. We have all made creative whiskers to wear to Jackie’s presentation. Stay tuned for photos of us with our whiskers on and a report of her visit.
Here’s a link to Jackie’s website: http://www.jackiefrench.com
Our Year 6/7 buddies helped us make our whiskers during one of our buddy sessions. Here’s some photos of the whisker making session.
Book Study – Gansta Granny
Our student teacher Mrs Meinel started reading a novel with us today. The novel is called Gansta Granny by David Williams. Mrs Meinel talked to us about her Granny and all of the special things they do together. She could remember lots of lovely details about activities and things that remind her of her Granny. We were shown a quilt that showed lots of her families history through different memory squares on the quilt. We just loved learning what the quilt meant. Then we shared our memories of our Nannies, Grans, Pas, Grandpas or Poppies – it was a really interesting conversation.
After we talked about our families Mrs Meinel started to read the novel Gansta Granny. She read us the blurb on the back of the book so we got a bit of an idea about the novel.
Here’s a bit about the story:
It’s a funny and moving story of old age, adventure, stolen jewels and swimming the Thames.
Our hero Ben is bored beyond belief after he is made to stay at his grandma’s house. She’s the boringest grandma ever: all she wants to do is to play Scrabble, and eat cabbage soup. But there are two things Ben doesn’t know about his grandma.
1) She was once an international jewel thief.
2) All her life, she has been plotting to steal the Crown Jewels, and now she needs Ben’s help…
From Amazon.com
We’ve read a couple of chapters and we really like it so far…. Stay tuned for more novel updates and activities we’re doing that relate to Gansta Granny!
What do you like about the novel Gansta Granny so far?
Can you suggest a novel our class would enjoy reading?
Special Visitor
Today we had a special visitor to start our day. We had a ‘Granny’ pop in to visit us in our class and she talked to us all about the things she loves to do, eat (lots of cabbage!) and games she loves to play, like Scrabble. She talked to us about our families and we described the Grannies, Grandpas, Nannies, Pas, Nans and special elderly people in our lives. It was a wonderful surprise to have such a lovely visitor.
Term 2 Begins
This week we started our second term for the school year. We’ve got an amazing term ahead – so busy with lots of wonderful learning opportunities, like our Narnu Camp, the Farm Moobile visiting with Farmer Damien, an author visit by Jackie French, Bike ed, CSIRO Lab on Legs and the list goes on. That’s just the ‘special’ activities – we’ll be doing lots of fun learning in our room too!
We’ve got Nikki working with us as a student teacher and we’re sure her prac in our class will be a huge success – we love working with her already!
Stay tuned on this blog for updates during the term!
SRC Reps
Today Jaime and Jackson received their SRC badges so they are ‘officially’ the SRC reps for our class.
Jaime and Jackson have already been wonderful School Representative Council reps – helping to run class meetings and reporting to the whole school SRC meetings.
Here they are with their badges on!
Cybersafety
As a part of our learning we constantly use digital devices (iPods, iPads and computers) as a part of our learning. It is vitally important that we use these devices and the Internet in a safe way and make sure we are safe.
Our class always talks about only using first name online, not telling people our plans and using our class blog to report about our class learning and activities.
This week we’ve been viewing the YAPPY YouTube clips and creating our own online safety posters. Being YAPPY means:
Your name
Address
Phone number
Passwords
Your plans
Can you tell us different ways that you work safely online?
Narrative writing and stories
This term we’ve had a huge focus on learning about narrative writing. We’ve planned and written our own narratives as well as discussing the narrative structure of the books we’re reading from our good fit book boxes and classroom library.
A narrative has:
An introduction – the story starts setting the scene by describing the setting and time of the story and introduces the characters and we get some idea of the problem that is going to happen later as the story develops.
Series of events:
Problem/ Complication– this happens around the setting and the characters involved – it can be a problem or conflict that happens to the characters.
Resolution- a solution is found to solve the problem.
We’ve written lots of different narrative stories and we’re in the process of publishing them on iPads, iPods or on the laptops.
Then we investigated stories we read. Each student was given a book with a narrative chart – we needed to identify the settings, main characters, solution and resolution for each. Some stories were quite challenging!! It was lots of fun to see how authors write their stories and relate the plans to how we’ve been writing.
Here’s some of the books and charts we created:
