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!
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!
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.
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.
Hooray! Assessment week is over and we can get back into routine again! We started this morning with reading groups. There were a few changes in reading groups and we had to change some of our books into our new boxes. Then we got going on some reading tasks or reading to Mrs Taylor. We are all doing such a great job and have all been trying really hard, making great gains in our reading. Way to go 1T!
We also learnt about the long 'i' sound today. We worked out that ie, y, i, and i_e all say the long 'i' sound. Look how many words we knew that said 'i'!
We listened to a little bit of the book, 'You're a Bad Man, Mr Gum!' By Andy Stanton. Mr Gum is a man that doesn't like children, animals, fun and corn on the cob. He has an angry fairy who lives in his bathtub and makes Mr Gum keep the garden tidy or hits him with a frying pan. It gave us lots of ideas for our own stories! We had a great writing session and got to listen to some stories read to us by our peers. You can see by the smiles that these stories were very funny!
We did some graphing and position in the afternoon. We had to draw pictures on the left or right of a tree. This was a little tricky for some of us!
The day included some stamina reading. It's wonderful to see the excitement 1T had at reading their own chapter books! We made it to nearly ten minutes which isn't too bad on a Monday.
Over the last week we have been busy investigating what heat does to food. We got to chat to our buddy class about what we think happens to different foods when they're heated. We then discussed this as a whole group. We found out the some foods melt, like cheese or ice-cream, some foods get soft, like spaghetti and some foods change colour like egg. We got to put out scientist hats on and look at what happens to popcorn kernels when heat is applied. We looked at a video of popcorn kernels popping in slow motion. The heat made the kernel expand and then it looked like it grew all puffy. The best part was that we all got to eat popcorn and our room smelt like a movie theatre for the rest of the day!
We had a visit from Constable Crystal, a police woman. She came and talked to all of year one and year two about being safe online. We learnt that when we go online we need to make sure that mum and dad know. We also have to make sure that if we see anything that makes us feel uncomfortable we go and tell mum and dad. We learnt what 'personal information' is and that we shouldn't share our name or address with people we don't know. Constable Crystal said we had to promise to keep our computers out of our bedrooms and make sure we only use them in safe places like the lounge or dining room where mum or dad can see what we're doing.
Constable Crystal showed us all the stuff that she has on her police belt. She told us that police have guns to help keep us safe but she wasn't allowed to take it out and show us. We got to see where she keeps her walkie-talkie and that she uses it to call other police for help. We got to see how her baton becomes really long when she flicks it. Some of us thought it looked like a lightsaber! The best part of her equipment was the hand-cuffs. She let some of us try them and nearly everyone put up their hand to have a go! We got a 'keeping safe' sticker to take home too!
News this term has been very interesting! We're learning to be active listeners and how to listen with our whole bodies. That means we need still bodies, watching eyes and listening ears. We then have to think about what the person said before we ask questions. Our questions are becoming much more relevant as we learn how to ask good questions. We've been finding out about everyone's favourite pasta meal and also how to play some simple games. We recently heard about the Chinese game of Mah Jong!
His name was Liam Crawly and he explained how heat changes food and how it changes the sugars in fruit. It makes fruit taste sweeter. We then got to taste fresh blueberries and then cooked blueberries. Some of us thought the fresh blueberries tasted a little sour. Everyone agreed that the cooked blueberries tasted very sweet! Yum! There were a few of us that didn't try the blueberries because they though they were, 'Yuck!'. But most of us tried the cooked blueberry jam.
We then got to smell cinnamon bark. Some of us thought it tasted like porridge! Liam then explained how spices change when they're heated. He heated the cinnamon up and we could smell that. He then cooked up some apple with a little bit of cinnamon. When it was finished cooking he puréed it with an electric blender which was a little bit noisy. We tried some cut up apple and then tried the apple purée. It was warm and delicious!
We also got to talk about how pikelets are made and even got to eat a pikelet as well. Some of us put the apple purée on top of the pikelet and some of us went back for seconds! The apple purée was the favourite of the day!
During the cooking session we heard about how food changes when heat is applied. We talked about how the texture of food changes, going from hard to soft, that the sugar in food becomes sweeter and spices become tastier when heated. Just like curry! There were lots of hands that went up when Liam asked if they liked curry! I was very suprised!
At the end of the session we asked some great questions about food and heat and then thanked Liam for coming. We can't wait to do some more experiments with food and heat over the term!
What is PIE and why are we learning about it? We are learning about the author's purpose! Why did the author write the book, or the article, or the poster? That's where PIE comes in! The author writes to persuade, inform or entertain. Today we learnt about the different sorts of reasons authors write. PIE is a great way to remember the author's purpose!
We continue to enjoy listening to each other give our news about our favourite pasta meal. Here are some of our lovely presenters! Don't they look confident!
You could feel the excitement in the air as we all lined up this morning. Enormous smiles from some and nervous giggles from others. We had a long walk down to the park which was quite an adventure and tired some of us out. Luckily there was a cake stall or recess to energise us before our race. We all tried so hard as you can see from the photos below.
Welcome back to term two 1T! We've got an exciting term in store! We began with reading groups straight off on our first day back! We hit the ground running and I must thank Dee for being ready to listen to our lovely students read on that first day back. We also had assembly on Wednesday and some of us got to stand on the stage to help all of kindergarten, year 1 and 2 sing along to 'Going to the Zoo' and doing the actions. We did a fabulous job!
We even had number groups on our first day back! My number group practiced our numbers before and after, played a game where you needed to find the answers to some doubles and we also had to add on to 20 rolling a dice using a number line. We were so busy learning that the time just flew by!
On Friday we did some rotating literacy activities looking at the long 'a' sound, nouns, using our whisper phones to read to ourselves and writing for our 'Wow Wall'. I must say a big thank you to both Samuel and Xavier's families who have made some more whisper phones so that we now have enough for everybody to use one when we're reading to ourselves! Thank you!
We then had our computer lesson using google classroom where we learnt how to change font colour, size and style before we learnt how to insert a picture into our slide.
We ended our week with an amazing SISA lesson! We're learning our fundamental movement skills with some amazing equipment. Check it out!
Here's a little taste of our last two STEM afternoon sessions. We'll be putting something in the newsletter next term that lets you know a little more about what we were doing. I got to go to all the classes briefly on Thursday afternoon and the buzz coming from all the classes was wonderful!
I had someone take photos of reading groups in action this week. We're very busy during reading groups so it's been difficult to record us working. But we have worked really hard and you can see us below. We read with Mrs Taylor or a parent, work with words (playing sight word memory, phonics and sight word board games and make words such as rhyming words), are beginning to work on simple comprehension strategies (making predictions, making connections, visualising, summarising using who, what, where, when and why or identifying the beginning, middle and end of the story), technology (iPad sight word and phonics games/listening to stories) and practicing our writing (using pictures or sentence starters). We rotate through activities in the mornings during our literacy groups on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. Wednesday and Thursday have been shorter days this term because of our weekly assembly and SISA sport. Next term we won't have SISA on Thursday so will be able to have a normal reading session on that day.
We all got into our Google Classroom today! What an achievement! Once in there we had a link to click on with our mouse and then we got to play a game from ABCYa called 'consonant blends'. Check it out below! ABCYa Consonant Blends
Everyday is a learning day! So here's a little glimpse into some of what we're doing during the day!
We've been learning to create mental pictures while we read. This is called visualising. 'Visualising' is a strategy we use to help us think about what might happen next, to remember details about the text we're reading and it helps us get really involved in the text too. We've been learning that this helps us to understand what we read better.
We've been trying really hard to write more content. Our parents coming to see our work was just the inspiration we needed to write a page! Look at these books!
We have been learning about 'grammar' which caused a few giggles as many thought I was talking about 'Grandma'. We're working on nouns, verbs and adjectives, what they are and where we use them. Camille asked if the word 'slowly' was a verb, so we had a great class discussion about adverbs and got to walk slowly and think of adverbs to add to the verbs, write, run and walk. There were lots of slow motion walkers in our room.
We've been learning about length and the terms longer than and shorter than a metre and today we used our feet to measure. We got to go outside and with a partner measure the length and width of the basketball courts. We then came in and compared our measurements. We discussed why the measurements were all different and how we could get around that. We decided that we needed to measure items with the same item and that our feet are all different lengths so we can't use them. What a wonderful discussion about length and the importance of regular units of length in measuring items. We also talked about the importance of measuring by placing their foot one in front of the other rather than just normal steps. Lots of thoughtful discussion!
Here you can see some of the lengths we found. And below some of us in action!
Our stamina reading is almost at 10 minutes. We are really good at reading by ourselves. We now get a few books, get comfy in a quiet spot and then read out loud, use our whisper phones or read in our heads. Don't we look like we love reading time! It's just lovely! It's just a pity Mrs Taylor only has four cushions!
This afternoon we sang along to our assembly song for the week, Mr Clicketty Cane's 'Wash your face with orange juice' which is definitely a favourite. After we sang that we then sang, 'The Ants go Marching'. What a great way to end the afternoon!
