Urrbrae Secondary School Excursion

Posted on June 27, 2016 by lisasporn

Today the Year 1/2 and Year 2 classes visited Urrbrae Secondary School and the Nature Education Centre as a part of our current Inquiry unit about Ecosystems and the human impact upon ecosystems.

WOW!!! We had a fantastic day and learnt so much new information from the experts there.

We didn’t know a lot about freshwater ecosystems – now we do.

We started our day at the Nature Education Centre, where Sally introduced us to a ring tailed possum, a bearded dragon lizard, a sleepy lizard, a carpet python and an owl.

Next, we walked over to the wetlands area and walked on a special trail to explore the plants and larger animals that live in this habitat. Each team had a recorder with a checklist, one person with a microscopic view finder, one person with the charts to help identify creatures that we saw and everyone had binoculars for a closer view. We used tallies to count some of the animals – especially the rainbow lorikeets. A part of our tour was to look at the drains that feed the fresh water into the wetland areas and the nets that catch all of the rubbish, leaf litter and many other items that come into the wetlands when it rains. This showed us the impact of humans on ecosystems and gave us some new ideas for how we need to continue to care for our environments.

After lunch, we explored the waters of the wetlands. Each team used nets, water trays and ice cube trays to collect water, mud, plant bits and any tiny creatures that live in the water. Then we used spoons and pipettes to scoop water into the ice cube trays and carried these inside to the digital microscopes. Using these digital microscopes we could see all of the aquatic macro invertebrates. We used more charts to find out which types of aquatic macro invertebrates lived in these waters. We found lots of red worms, water slugs and water boatman.

We can’t wait to get back to school and use our new information to help our inquiry investigations.

Our final activity was a bit of a surprise – we went up into a grassland area and build some stick cubby houses or structures. It was a great fun way to finish the day.

We’d like to say a huge thank you to Sally from the Nature Ed Centre, Ann Louise from Urrbrae SS Wetlands classroom and John, Stacey and Alice – the Craigburn Primary parent helpers. Our helpers made sure our day was a great success.

Some more photos of our excursion – thanks Alice for the extras!

What was your favourite part of the day?

Little Bits and Dash and Dot

Posted on May 26, 2016 by lisasporn

We love to use technology to help us with our learning. We’ve begun using iPads from home (if you have one), as well as the school sets of iPads and we’ve been using Bee Bots, Bee Bot apps and Scratch Jnr. These programs teach us how to problem solve, program, sequence a set of instructions, estimate, collaborate and co-operate – as well as many other skills we need. Plus – it’s lots of fun!

This week we borrowed 10 Little Bits kits and Dot and Dash robots from Adelaide University. We have these amazing resources until the end of term and couldn’t wait to get started with experimenting with them.

The Little Bits have showed us how to use simple magnetic bricks to click them together and then connect to a power source to create a simple circuit. Now that we understand how they work we’re looking forward to using the Little Bits in models that we create.

Dash and Dot are robots that can be programmed using the Blockly app or use the Wonder app to control their movements. Mr Luke, our Deputy Principal, even visited to try and move Dash around the room.

We also used clip on digital microscopes on our iPads. We are exploring Ecosystems as our current Inquiry topic and went outside to explore our grasslands ecosystem. The clip on microscopes were a fantastic way to see living and non living items up close. We could see so much more detail through the microscopes and we took some great photos of them using our camera app.

What are your favourite types of technology to use? How do you use technology to support your learning?

Wacky-a-thon!

Posted on May 26, 2016 by lisasporn

Today we held our school’s biggest fund raising event – the Wacky-a-thon! Everyone was asked to come dressed in something wacky and participate in our fun run type of events. We had a great day for it (although lots of rain overnight made things tricky) and everyone in our class was really energetic to complete as many laps as they could.

A big thank you to all of the teachers, Mr Warncken and the SLEG students for organising our day – it was a great success.

What types of technology do you use?

Posted on May 11, 2016 by lisasporn

This post is especially for our family members or anyone who would like to post a comment.

In our class at Craigburn Primary School we love to use technology to support our learning. We’ve been learning about ways to work ‘safely’ online. There are some important points we must remember when we’re using technology online. They are:

protecting our personal information
online etiquette
digital footprints
how technology has changed over time

Technology is changing so quickly – here’s a clip to show just some of the changes over the last 30 years.

Just look at how much information is published to the Internet in just 1 minute!

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Now that we have students bringing iPads from home to use at school our learning is becoming more exciting by the day!

We use our Interactive Whiteboard everyday (they’re in every classroom and some rooms have Apple TVs) and it’s a great learning tool for us to use.

We have created a Google slide presentation to show the types of technology we love to use – both at home and at school.

We would love to hear about the types of technology that our parents, grandparents, aunties, uncles and family friends have used – maybe even add a picture so we can see what it looks like. Maybe you’ve used a Discman, Walkman, Gameboy handset, electronic typewriter….or something we’ve never heard of! We look forward to hearing from you all.

What forms of technology have you used?

The latest information sessions for Term 2 are about to start – if you would like to attend the introduction course and start our iTunesU course please follow this link.

Term 2 iPad parent sessions

Happy Mother’s Day

Posted on May 8, 2016 by lisasporn

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We would like to wish all of our Mums, Aunties and Grandmothers are very special Mother’s Day. We hope you have a wonderful day and enjoy the presents and cards that we’ve made.

5 Way Swings

Posted on May 5, 2016 by lisasporn

We’re really lucky to have a new 5 way swing set at school. We’ve had a great time playing on the new swings and sharing them with everyone at school.

Thanks to the CPS fundraising committee for organising activities to help raise the money to buy these swings.

Whisper Phones

Posted on April 12, 2016 by lisasporn

We now have some brand new ‘whisper’ phones in our class to use during reading activities, as a part of our Daily 5 Reading tasks.

We LOVE our whisper phones which were made by John Nuske, Isaac’s Dad from our class. John made 80 whisper phones – a class set for each of our Year 2 team classes. We use our phones to whisper reading our books from our good fit book boxes. We MUST whisper into the phone because it’s too loud in our ears if we speak into them. These phones are a wonderful way for us to hear ourselves read and help us to further develop our reading skills.

We’d like to say a huge THANK YOU to John for making our whisper phones – he collected the materials, negotiated cheaper prices for our materials, had materials donated by Bunnings and Reece’s Plumbing in Blackwood and spent many hours putting them together. You’re amazing John – thank you so much. Also, thanks to Isaac for being a handy helper.

BYO iPad Program

Posted on April 11, 2016 by lisasporn

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Just a quick reminder – if you would like your child to bring their iPad to school to support their learning you need to attend the parent induction sessions to hear the outline of the iTunesU course and the school’s expectations and program outline.

Here’s the link to the latest information sessions

Craigburn Connections

Amazing Art!

Posted on April 6, 2016 by lisasporn

We’ve created 2 amazing Art pictures using an idea Miss Sporn saw on the Red Ted Art Website. The site showed a tribute to Vincent Van Gough’s Sunflower painting. We searched on the internet to see the different ark works created by Van Gough and then looked at techniques we could use to create them.

Everyone in our class created at least 1 flower and then we made the vases. We put the vase and flowers all together and they’re on display in Room 5 – next to our classroom.

What are some of your favourite Art activities? Can you give us any suggestions for Art ideas?

Buddy Class Clean Up

Posted on April 6, 2016 by lisasporn

Today we did a fantastic activity with our Year 6/7 buddy class. We cleaned up the entire school yard and then graphed our findings. We created 2 graphs – 1 showed what type of rubbish we collected and the other showed which areas had the most amount of rubbish.

Mr Spurr did an amazing job leading this activity with the Year 6/7 students – we LOVED working with our buddies.

It was interesting to see what type of rubbish we found in the yard – lots of plastic wrappers/ plastic rubbish were the most common. Check out the movie showing every part of the process.

We talked about these graphs in our class and worked out ways we can keep our school cleaner in the future.

A huge thank you to Damien, Katie and Sam for working really hard with Mr Spurr to complete the graphs during recess time – a very messy job!

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