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Excursion to Ayres House and the Migration Museum

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Today was an exciting day in our learning. We went on an excursion to the city of Adelaide to explore 2 different places. Our current Inquiry topic is about investigating how items have changed over time and so we visited Ayres House and the Migration Museum to see what they could show us.

First, we arrived at Ayres house to see if we could apply for jobs as servants in the grand old house. There was going to be a Ball that night and they needed extra help. When we knocked on the front door 2 ladies came to answer the door Mrs Wood and Mrs Peters. They asked to see if our hands were clean and then inspected our teeth – making sure there were no rotten teeth. Then we had to twirl on the spot while they watched our movements. We were taken into the main dining room area and were taught how to carry trays with special crockery on them – making sure to be careful not to drop them and the tray wasn’t allowed to rattle. We had to work silently at all times and with grace!

One of our first tasks was to learn how to do jobs in the kitchen, such as cooking, grinding coffee beans, grinding spices, making butter, making jelly in moulds, preparing dinner, rolling out pastry and making baked goods.

Then we toured the house with Mrs Wood and she showed us how to clean and polish the furniture and grand staircase. We went into the bedrooms to learn how to make the beds, dust the furniture and clean out the chamber pots – luckily they we didn’t have to empty them out! Then we went to the Nursery to look at the room where the children are fed, play and sleep. The golden rule was ‘children were to be seen and not heard’. 

 

When we returned downstairs we had to learn the different bells that are used by the owners of the house. There were 3 bells to learn – the Gentleman’s bell, the Ladies bell  and the bell for the children’s room. The bells helped us to learn which rooms we were needed in.

We thanked the ladies for having us as visitors and headed off along North Terrace to the Migration Museum.

After a lunch under the lovely verandah of the Migration Museum we began exploring.

We divided into 2 groups – one group went to the classroom area and one group went into the Migration Museum.

In the Migration Museum we learnt about the Aboriginal people who lived here when explorers landed here from England. It was interesting to learn about all of the different Aboriginal groups in Australia and find out about their lives. Then we moved further into the museum to find out about the early settlers in Australia. We learnt about the items they brought with them from England and why they’d brought them here. There were lots of slides, artefacts, maps and models to look at in this area.

We dressed up in uniforms from the olden days and given new names that were quite different to ours. We always had to let the ladies go first when moving around the different displays.

 

Then we moved over to the old classroom area. We had to march into class and sit on the special mat for the class.  We learnt about how Aboriginals were treated by the new settlers to Australia and how lives started in a new country. We then practised being in an old fashioned classroom – even doing handwriting lessons on blackboards with slate pencils, writing in cursive. Again, we saw models of meals that people ate and it didn’t look very tasty.

Our last activity was to play old fashioned games in the Migration Museum courtyard.  We played hoops with sticks, knuckles and quoits. It wasn’t as easy as it looked.

We had a fantastic day of learning and gained a far greater insight into just how much things have changed from the 1800’s to today.

We’d like to say a huge thank you to the staff of Ayres House and the Migration Museum. They all gave us such a wonderful insight into our history and how lives and items have changed so much over time.

We’d also like to say thanks to Kath and Ahmad – the 2 best parent helpers on the day! They were a wonderful support.

What were some of your highlights of  our excursion?

 

 

Camp Quality Puppet Performance

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Today we watched a fantastic performance by the Camp Quality puppeteers. The show explained how some people get cancer or leukaemia and then detailed how it is treated. They used the characters Kylie and Deano to explain the disease. This was a very uplifting performance with a really clear message for us to learn.

Thanks to the families who were able to make a gold coin donation.

Footsteps Dance – Week 2

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This week we continued our Footsteps dance lessons by learning a partner dance.

We learnt our new dance to a song from the Trolls movie and had lots of fun learning all of the steps. It was a very fast song and some of the moves were rather tricky!

A huge clap to Emma and Max who were brave enough to go up on stage and be a partner in front of all of the students. Great bravery!

Here’s some photos and short clips from today’s session.

 

Inquiry – Change Over Time

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This week we started investigating our latest Inquiry topic. This topic is about the concept of investigating how objects have changed over time. This could include many different artefacts, including ourselves.

We’ve started our ‘Tuning In‘ time by sharing different objects from home that come from all different parts of our lives. So far we’ve heard about:

  • a pewter mug
  • an acrylic painting
  • an ink well and writing implement
  • a copper cooking pot
  • a book
  • a snuff box
  • stamp collections
  • old photographs of family members
  • just to get us started. We can’t wait to see what our classmates bring in!

    

     

Another ‘Tuning In‘ task was to sort pictures of different artefacts into 2 piles – either Long Ago or Today. This created really interesting discussions about why people had sorted their cards into certain piles. Then we did a ‘gallery walk‘ to see how other groups had sorted their pictures. We LOVE using pictures in our Inquiry.

    

      

   

     

     

      

       

Today we did a placemat activity. An artefact was put onto different placemats and we talked to our partners to discuss what it might be, what was it made of, how was it used and what might it look like today – how has it changed? Then we recorded onto our placemats using these titles to sort our thinking:

  • What is it?
  • How does it……?
  • It reminds me of…….
  • Wonderings……..

These are our wonderings on our placemats.

We wonder what we’ll investigate next?

We love seeing these new artefacts and discovering how they’ve changed over time.

What do you think we might investigate next?

 

City Planners

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As a part of our Inquiry into structures features we worked together on a special task. As we came to the end of this topic, we decided to create a town together using all of the concepts we’ve learnt over the past few weeks – considering the geography of where it should be built, the climate we’d build it in, the types of materials available and what makes a stable structure.

The first part of our plan was where would we place our new development (Geography) – the group decided on a flat plain area in South Australia. We also wanted to have a river nearby as a source of water for the town’s residents and for any industry in the town, e.g. the power station.

Then we brainstormed what a town needs vs wants. On our list below you’ll see some ‘wants’ crept onto the list – it was for the locals to be entertained and to attract more people to visit the town.

Our list was:

  • a power station
  • a shopping centre – with food shops a top priority
  • an apartment block
  • homes
  • a Kindy
  • a school
  • a high school
  • a University
  • a hospital
  • a dentist
  • a vet
  • a train station
  • a petrol station
  • an airport
  • a farm
  • a cafe
  • a park
  • a zoo – for locals to visit and attract tourists
  • a Police station
  • a Fire station
  • a courthouse
  • a gaol
  • a park
  • public toilets
  • a motel for tourists
  • a carpark
  • a bridge
  • a cinema
  • a bank.

Each student then chose a structure to make- using past information about what buildings look like, how they’re designed, the look of the structure and the materials that are available in the local area to help with construction. (These points covered all of the key concepts of our Inquiry).

Here is our mind map – it lists structures and who was responsible to create it.

 

Then we had a couple of very busy days of construction – we’d created rough drawings, plans and located the materials we needed. It was VERY busy!

Today we finally put our new city/ town together. We had a long and very detailed discussion about how to plan a town, where structures should be placed and why (most importantly).

Jesse and Riley volunteered to make roads for our town and a river too. Thanks for volunteering for the extra preparations boys.

We noticed that we’d used a grid pattern to create our town – all flowing from the original main street. This is how many towns and cities are planned around the world.

 

 

 

 

 

The entire town:

After we’d finished creating our town we wrote a report on Seesaw – we included a photo of the town, using a bird’s eye view to try and include all of the details, labels naming each structure and a descriptive sentence to explain our decisions. We’ve already received some great feedback from parents about our town – we loved reading their comments.

Here we are trying to get the best angle for our bird’s eye photo and recording our information about the town. We always work together to help with any technical ‘issues’ = teamwork!

 

What do you think of the town we’ve created? Does is have everything it needs or can you offer some suggestions of more items we could include?

What was your favourite part of creating our town together and why?

Seesaw Family App Update

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Last week the Seesaw app had some major updates. Many of the changes were for teachers, through the addition of many features we can implement when using the Seesaw app in class with our students. The Parent app is now called Family and has also had some updates and new additions.

Here is a very handy YouTube clip outlining the updates for the Family app.

 

 

Gymnastics

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Over the last 4 weeks all of the Year 2 and 3 classes have been attending weekly gymnastics lessons with Andrew. We’ve been developing lots of new skills using different techniques. We’ve worked hard to improve our muscle strength and learn the different ways to build up skills to then complete a specific move, e.g. froggy jumps, kicks and then up into a handstand.

We’ve learnt how to:

  • bounce on a trampoline onto a big mat
  • jump
  • hop
  • stretch all of our muscles
  • do the splits
  • do forward rolls
  • do backwards rolls
  • roll
  • skip
  • do handstands
  • do strength holds
  • throw and catch hoops
  • do different running exercises
  • slide and pull ourselves along on mats
  • balance by ourselves or with a partner

and so many more skills. In fact, this list is just a part of our activities.  Every activity taught us a skill but then we used that skill to do a more complex move.

We had an exciting time and loved every minute of our programme. We were very tired, hot and sweaty by the end of each session.

Sound Cubes

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Our class has started using the new sound cubes to help us when we’re recording our voice on an iPad. These sound cubes block out all surround sound so we can clearly hear our voices on recordings we’ve made, e.g. we’ve recorded our voices using the Seesaw app to listen to our reading fluency, our sounding out skills, our ability to back up and re-read if we make a mistake and to hear what we sound like when we’re reading out aloud.

Our sound cubes are a fabric box (cube) and have egg cartons glued on cardboard along each side. Some have sound proof foam too. The cubes are really easy to use and we can’t wait until we try them again – what a great reason to keep reading.