At the moment we are working on writing about ourselves. We are learning about shaping our letters properly, leaving finger spaces, adding detail and reading our writing our writing to others.
At the end of every Writing Workshop our teachers choose pieces of quality work for us to share with our class. We try so hard to be the ones who are chosen to read our writing.We are learning to love our writing time.
Stage 1 Pearl Mini-Makers
We are some of the Stage 1 Mini-Makers. Our teacher challenges our imagination and creativity. We think about making the things we imagine after talking and working together with our teacher.
Our teacher encourages us to think critically and creatively. We use lots of leftover goodies to make our amazing imaginings. Sometimes we use our digital age skills and sometimes we don’t.
Our teachers provide us with opportunities to:
Our Mini-Maker Program draws on the arts, music, engineering, design and computer science skills.
Making is not a novelty, a fad or a trend that will fade it is a way of learning by doing. Our students have authentic problems to solve, they are challenged to think creatively and critically, reflect and re-do if need be. Our Mini- Makers program is based on the premise that children engage with learning when it is challenging and fun.
Implementation
Stay tuned as we show you what we do as we work through our exciting and interesting week.
Can you read our story?
Draw Talk Think Write Share
Kindergarten are getting into the hang of Writing and Reading.
They can recognise, name and sound many letters of the alphabet.
They practice their alphabet everyday and all are practising writing their names on the Daily Sign In sheet.
Once upon a time there lived two little children called Hansel and Gretel. They lived in a tiny cottage in the woods. They did not have any food at all.
One day their Step Mother (who did not like them) said to their dad “take these horrible children deep down in the woods.” So their father said “come with me”.
The next day Hansel and Gretel came home. Their Step Mother was furious. She shouted at Hansel and Gretels father “take them back to the woods and leave them there.”
So he took the children into the forest and left them there.
By Josephine
Edited by Kyla
On Thursday 19th September our school celebrated Carnivale. In Carnivale each Stage learns about a country. On the day the children dress-up as something from their country.
Stage One learnt about Africa. There were Elephants, Meerkats, Giraffes, Zebras and Lions.
Kindergarten studied Australia. Kindergarten dressed up as Koalas, Kangaroos, Cockatoos, dogs, Ned Kelly, vegemite and a hockey roo.
Stage two discovered information on Brazil. There were lots of soccer players. There was a Sloth and a toucan.
Stage three researched Canada. There were lots of sport players and a few Canadian Native Indian.
Kindergarten performed a song about Australia. Stage 1 danced to an African song. Stage 2 wowed the crowd with a traditional dance from Brazil and lucky last Stage 3 sang Canada’s national anthem and that is where our big day ended.
By Kyla
Today in our Writing Workshop we thought it was time we started looking at Blogs from around the world.
We chose to visit two blogs today and practised looking at them and thinking up complimentary things to say about the blogs.
We all agreed it was easy to make up comments because the blogs we visited were awesome.
We visited 1/2 W @ Balwyn Primary School a school in Victoria. It was interesting to see what great builders they are and we were fascinated the class was learning Chinese. WOW!!
We the decided to visit Mrs Myer’s 3rd Graders Reach for the Sky. First thing we did was to find out where Apache ,Arizona is in the World. We found out it is the United States of America and checked it out.
We enjoyed reading about the great things Mrs Myer’s class have been doing since they came back to school.
We noticed that In Apache they sleep when we are awake. We also noticed the school year in Arizona begins in August when ours begins in January. We watched the videos made by the students and heard the girls spoke English like we do but with a different accent.
We are excited about the Blog Challenge 2013. But we will be on holidays from 20 September to 9 October but we WILL BE ABOUT!!
Our Writers’ Workshop group are participating in the 2013 Blog Challenge. We are a group of 6 to 8 year old students who go to school in the New South Wales country town of Lithgow.
Our town is about 120 kms west of the great Australian city of Sydney.
Where we live is on the edge of the famous Blue Mountains. Our mountains are full of deep canyons, caves and the cliff faces are spectacular under the different light that falls on them across a day.
Our Summers are very hot and our Winters are cold with lots of frost and sometimes it snows.
Some of us live in town, some on the outskirts of town and others of us live on farms in the countryside.
One focus for our Writing Workshop is to use descriptive language. We need to be able to think and then write our ideas using really interesting words.
Tongue Twisters are sentences and sometimes poems that use consonants strung together to make interesting tongue curling phrases which when spoken fast tie our tongues in knots.
This putting together of consonants is also called Alliteration.
In our Tongue Twisters we had to have:
A noun: name of a person, place ot thing;
A verb: an action word, a doing word;
An adverb: a word that makes a verb more interesting, often they end in ..ly;
An Adjective: a word that adds description to a noun.
We read tongue twisters on Nanas Corner.
Animalia by Graeme Base is filled with amazing tongue tying phrases as well brilliant pictures of animals, people and places.
Here are some of our first efforts:
Tommie tortoise was taught to talk to Terence turtle.
Lion loved laughing on the lake.
Baby baboon bakes brown bread.
Jemima
Rhino runs around rivers.
Slithery snakes slither through slightly long grass.
Toothless tiger can’t bite through tough things.
Hungry hippo hopped into hopeless things.
Paul
Proud parrot pranced proudly past prickly plants.
Viscious vulture versed the Vampire.
Josephine
What if one of those African Animals came to our town? How would you feel what would you do? What if more than one animal arrived on your doorstep?
Here are some of our thoughts:
What if someone stole a lion from the Zoo? What would the lion do?
What if a giraffe was cooking in the kitchen? What would it cook?
What if a cheetah wanted to play and run around? What would happen?
What if a zebra was attacked? Was it really hurt?
What if you had a pet lion would you return it to the Zoo?
What if a cheetah jumped into your bed what would happen?
What if you counted all the stripes on a zebra? How many would there be?
Paul
What if a lion was living in your house? What if a lion was in the bath? What if the lion went to the shops with you? What if a lion went to bed with you? What if the lion were your teacher? What if a lion went to school with you? What if a lion was bad? What if the lion went to the Club with you?
Hayley
What if a monkey came to your house and ate all of your bananas? You would have none left for school.
What if the monkey started to speak? What if you took him to the shops and he climbed up on the shelves and ate all the bananas?
What if you named it Cuddles?
What if the monkey went to the park and knocked all the children off the play equipment just because he wanted it all to himself?
Abbey
What if a meerkat came to stay? What if it sleptover? What would it sleep in? What if it was really hungry waht would it eat? What wioould you feed it?
What would it play with?
What if your Mum did not like the meerkat? What if the children love the meerkat and it had to go?
What could the children do about it?
If the meerkat bit you what would you do? What if it gave you a giant hug?
Kailey
Countries, people and animals of Africa animals have been the focus of our class work in the last part of this term.
In our Writing Stars Group we have been working on writing about a variety of African animals.
To help us with developing descriptive words we took a lesson on drawing some well known African animals. We watched a youtube video and followed the instructions of the artist.
It was hard work; some of us did really well and some of us will do better next time.
Here are our results. Click on the link below to have a look at what we drew.
http://animoto.com/play/0CQRJtMvcRndY1JgWn4PJA