Monday 26 June 2017

Egg Experiment

We kept eggs in vinegar and highlighter ink for a whole week! We watched as the shell disintegrated over the week and then cleaned the foamy residue off before having a small bounce and prod. Unfortunately the one egg popped but the other one was handled by the whole class and held up. We then held a light under the egg and saw how the egg glowed. It was so exciting!

  

Thursday 22 June 2017

Literacy Groups

Literacy groups are a busy time of the day! We practice our reading, decoding and comprehension skills with different activities, tasks and games. We couldn't do this without the help of our wonderful parent volunteers! The iPads are always a favourite activity! Mrs Taylor just has to pry them off her own children to be able to bring them in. The game we used this week was 'Word Wow Big City'. The purpose of the game is to create words of three or more letters while moving the little worm down the board to freedom.  Another great game was 'Go Fish'. We used cards with and without the bossy or magic e and had to match them. Eg. rod and rode, bit and bite, tap and tape. It was great practice working out how the bossy e makes the letter sound say its letter name. Here are some photos of our class in action!
 

Tuesday 20 June 2017

Creativity in the Classroom

Check out the amazing work we've been involved in creating over this term!
 
   

Saturday 10 June 2017

Read like a Robot

Read like a Robot
We often talk about building fluency when reading and making our reading sound like talking. Here's a fun YouTube video to watch about trying to NOT read like a Robot. And a photo below of my family's recent visit to Vivid. 
 

Monday 5 June 2017

Writing is a gift!

I've been so lucky to have some wonderful stories coming into school that have been written at home. These are wonderful pieces of writing that have been written for no other reason other than to bring in and share with the class. I'm making sure that we find time (usually in the morning) to read these. Wow! We've come such a long way!

We continued to read our story, 'You're a Bad Man Mr Gum!'. What a laugh! A great read aloud from the United Kingdom. I needed to buy it off amazon as it wasn't available in our library. As its a chapter book its given us great opportunities to discuss the images we have in our heads about the book - we refer to this as 'visualising'. We especially liked to imagine what the fairy who likes to hit Mr Gum over the head looks like, when he doesn't look after his garden. We've also been making some great predications about what is happening next and using the story to help our writing. We use the phrase, 'I predict...' when we're making predictions in class.
 
We practiced our measuring today with paper-clips. We had to make sure that when we measured something we placed the paper-clip down on what we wanted to measure. We then needed to make a mark before moving the paper-clip along and then make a mark again. We talked about why it is important to measure carefully using the, 'make, mark and move' method so that we can measure by repeatedly placed end-to-end without gaps or overlaps a unit such as a paper clip. Some of us found these easier to do than others. We'll keep practising our measuring over the year.