Watch out for the dinosaurs!

Stage 2 reading groups have been reading and learning about dinosaurs. Students have been reading information texts, and have been learning to locate information in texts by using the contents page, captions, diagrams and headings.

Students selected and researched one dinosaur of interest. They wrote  short information reports and labelled diagrams about them.

Have a read of some great examples:

Triceratops (By Jimmy)

Triceratops was a dinosaur. Its name means three-horned face.

Triceratops had a large head with three horns on it. Around its neck it had a thick, bony plate.

Triceratops was a plant-eating dinosaur. It lived in forests and grasslands.

jimmys diagram

Brachiosaurus (By Victoria)

Brachiosaurus was a dinosaur. It means arm lizard.

Brachiosaurus had a long neck and a thick tail.

Brachiosaurus ate leaves in the tops of trees. Brachiosaurus lived in forests near lakes. This dinosaur liked standing in water.

victorias diagram

Do you have any questions about dinosaurs? Perhaps we can answer them for you by finding the information in our dinosaur books.

S2H Artworks. Rain forest

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Before painting our rain forest scene we brainstormed what we already knew about rain forests from television, books and other sources. We looked at power points and video clips of rain forests. We talked about the three main layers of the rain forest and what could be found in each layer. We observed the different plants and trees found in a rain forest, the different colours and the colour changes from layer to layer. Here we are painting our rain forests.

Rainforest 1

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Rainforest 2

Stage 2 Story Writing

Stage 2 reading groups have been reading the book ‘Goodness me, Mr Magee!’

The story is about a farmer who goes to deliver pigs to Mrs Joe, but by the time Mr Magee gets to Mrs Joe’s house, the pigs have escaped!

We thought the book was really funny, so we continued the story by writing about what happens after the characters realise the pigs have escaped.

Mostafa: After Mr Magee saw the little mouse in his truck, he ran back to his farm but he did not find all his pigs. He had to buy new pigs. Then Mr Magee went to a pig shop but the shop keeper said, “sorry, there are no more pigs left.” The shop keeper told Mr Magee that there was another shop, so Mr Magee went to that shop and he bought the pigs and he went back to Mrs Joe’s house.

Grace: Then Mr Magee went back to the lunch shop and the coffee shop to look for the pigs. He found the two pink fat pigs. Mr Magee put these fat pigs back on the truck. Mr Magee drove to Mrs Joe’s house.

“Mrs Joe! Mrs Joe! I’ve got the big fat pigs. Now you can take them and eat them. They are really, really yummy. Buy them!”

She bought them, and after she ate them she said “they were really yummy.”

What did you think of our story endings? We hope you enjoyed them 🙂

Have you seen our Zoo?

Have you seen the Belmore South Public School Zoo?
Alright, we admit it is not really a zoo, but in the K Fox classroom we have lots of gorgeous animals! As part of reading and writing, we learn all about different letters – how they sound, what they look like, how to write the letter and which words use it. Then we get to make a colourful craft that uses the letter.

Can you see our crazy cats? Our gorillas and giraffes? Our spectacular squids? Our hairy hamsters? How about the oodles of octopi?

We love them all!

KWiggles’ Reconciliation Hands

While Miss Rhodes has been on holidays, we have been very busy preparing for Reconciliation Week and Cultural Infusion. We were very sad when the performers for Cultural Infusion did not arrive on the day, but we still got to participate in fun activities.

We watched a video on how to make an Aboriginal dot painting, and got to make one ourselves.

Here are some pictures of us finishing our dot paintings… these are now hanging on our fridges at home!

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This is a picture of the Reconciliation Week display in the school hall. We painted the handprints during Golden Time and Miss Hackney put them together to spell ‘Reconciliation’.

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We are looking forward to the dancing and face painting in a few weeks when Cultural Infusion is rescheduled.

KWiggles

Reading Coraline

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Our reading group has just finished reading Coraline by Neil Gaiman. We really enjoyed this scary book. We learnt a lot about suspense and how the author created it. We found and made up our own similes and explored the themes in the book. The activity we enjoyed the most are the ones in the photos. In Coraline there is an ‘other’ world where Coraline has an ‘other’ mother and ‘other’ father. In this ‘other’ world they have buttons for eyes. Miss McIntosh had us choose some buttons each to become our eyes and then we took photos of each other. We then had to write about what kind of a person might have those eyes and why. We had to think about colour, shape and texture. For example for the green eyes some of us thought that they DSCN2010might be evil because they are green. But others thought they might be kind, because of its round shape, and an environmentalist, because it is green. For the gold star person some thought that person might be greedy and rich, because of the gold, and a nasty person because of the sharp edges and rough texture.DSCN2006

We are now going to watch the movie and compare it to the book. It will be interesting to see what is the same and different, and how the director shows the house, the ‘other’ world and the characters. We will look at the director’s use of colour and music to create suspense.

Miss McIntosh’s reading group

Stage 3 Literacy

Voices In The Park 

 Stage 3 read ’Voices in the Park’ by Anthony Browne. It’s not a hard book to read,  but it deals with issues that are sometimes challenging to talk about, such as how people are sometimes opposite to each other, and have difficulty ‘getting along’. It looks at how you can get along with people who are very different to you.

 

Some ways you can do this are-

– find an activity you both like and do it

– talk to each other

– make an effort to get to know the other person.

The book was great because EVERYONE in the book except for two people ended up ‘getting along’ well.

We talked a lot about opposites and created a massive whole class diorama.

We decided to make our own version of the story.

 In pairs, we chose an activity, eg: dancing.

We chose two opposites, eg: patient/impatient.

We made two characters out of plasticine and assigned a trait to each, eg: one was patient, one impatient.

We made a prop, eg: a microphone.

The characters had to have a conversation about their activity. We wrote this using correct punctuation of direct speech onto large pieces of paper first. After checking it, we typed our conversations out.

We had about five pairs of characters, involved in an activity, having a conversation in a setting. These were then placed into a gigantic box to create a gigantic diorama of a story, kind of like ‘Voices In The Park’. Except we called ours “Voices Around The World”.

Have a look at the photo . Maybe Anthony Browne should write another book to show how the two people learn to get along – what do you think?

stage 3 at work on the diorama

stage 3 at work on the diorama