Merry Christmas!

Firstly, a BIG thank-you to everyone for their incredibly generous gifts and kind words over the past week. It has been a pleasure to teach your children and I look forward to working with many of you again next year.

Next year I will be using Edmodo as opposed to a class blog as I feel it will allow students to communicate and share their learning while gaining important skills for staying safe and being responsible on technology. The unique code for our Edmodo group will close in a couple of days (Dec 23rd) but don’t stress, I will be able to give students the new code on our first day back.

I hope you all have an incredible break and enjoy this special time with your family.

Thank-you again for your support and I will see you in 2015!

Christmas

Mad about Science + our learning this week!

Students have been learning about Chemical Science this Term.

After studying the original form of a number of materials, we have looked at them after adding a heat source (sunlight) and then after taking away heat entirely by placing them in the fridge and freezer.

Children have been creating a Science Journal to outline our learning and investigations..

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This week I learnt…

… that my arm length is almost half of my body – Matthew

…that my nose was 7cm – Alexander

…about our checklist in Big Write so we know what we have done – Mackenzie

…what the word voracious means (eager and want to do something) – Emily

…I am 1m69cm tall – Morgan

…in writing that every Thursday we do Big Write – Andrew

…about different herbs in Kitchen Garden – Locky

…about measuring and making a graph – Elli

…that there’s hundreds of different types of herbs. I leant that there is curly and flat-leaf herbs – Isabella

…some of my times tables. I learnt that I know my 1’2, 2’s and 3’s. I also enjoyed learning about the herbs in Kitchen Garden – Angel

…two things: that one of my arms is about half the size of my body. I also learned how to use a checklist – Freya

…in sport how to do push-ups – Ayesha

…in Numeracy I learnt that my height is 1m – Jye

…in Numeracy that my height is 1m 37cm – Nate

…in maths that my armspan is bigger than my height and my armspan is 1cm – Heath

…my VCOP colours – Ashley

…that my mouth and little finger was 6cm – Tahlia

…that your back is the biggest part of your body – Connor

…two kinds of parsley, curly and flat-leaf – Eva

…that I’m 2cm taller than my armspan – Jordan

…I how to play ‘Race to 100’ using more than one dice – Tamara

How do I measure up?

This week we are completing an investigation about measuring!
 

Students will be measuring a range of body parts and then making comparisons between them.
Be sure to ask how they are going as we found out some interesting information and made some comparisons between different body parts.

VCOP & Big Write

Today we had our first try at our Big Write session.
Our stimulus fir this week was ‘The Scientist’. Students have no doubt been talking to you about it and have come up with a wide range of ideas relating to our stimulus.

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Before conducting our VCOP Big Write session, students complete a lot of hands on ‘Big Talk’ activities that relate to our four VCOP areas; Vocabulary, Connectives, Openers and Punctuation.

During the VCOP Big Write session students have all the support materials they need including dictionaries, posters and iPads on their tables within easy reach.
Candles and classical music assist students to get into the writing ‘mood’.

Reflection
Some of the students thoughts after completing our Big Write session..

  • I liked it because I had more ideas in my head.
  • I liked that it was quiet and there was no talking.

Maths

Last week and this week we have been learning about measurement.

Last week we began by looking at measurement, focusing on length!
Students learnt how to measure objects (Play-Doh worms in this case) using counters as the unit. We progressed on to using rulers and measuring using cm and mm’s.

This week students have moved into measuring mass (weight). We started with ‘hefting’ and are moving into using grams and kilograms. Students have been finding things around the classroom that are ‘heavier’ and ‘lighter’ than themselves.

We have been busy predicting, observing and explaining our findings.

Weighing the mass of the cards using Unifix as our unit of measurement.

Weighing the mass of the cards using Unifix as our unit of measurement.

Police Visit

Today we had local police officer, Trudy Moreland come and talk to us.

We learnt about the different jobs and areas of expertise in the police force. Trudy taught us how to stay safe when crossing roads and hopping off the bus, as well as how to correctly fit our helmet.

Trudy talked about ways to stay safe on the internet and how to protect ourselves from strangers.

I have no doubt that the highlight was getting to sit in the police car and when Trudy turned on the alarm – it was VERY noisy!!