ANZAC Assembly

 

It was wonderful to see so many families at our ANZAC assembly on Friday. I hope that the learning the children have experienced at school enriches their thinking and reflection over the ANZAC weekend. The class have been full of admiration and pride for the ex-pupils of our school who served in the World Wars. They were surprised to find that many of the surnames on the plaque are names we all know from pupils at our school currently. Before the assembly Room 9 walked past the plaque one more time to reflect on the sacrifice of those with a close connection to all of us.

Poppy Growing

 Thank you to Allison for coming to school to help Room 9 plant poppies. Allison offered us so much more than just planting seeds, she explained germination, seed rot and why the poppies grew in the battlefields after the fighting had stopped.

We worked in small groups to plant our poppies, we watered them and waited. Some children thought the pot would have a plant like the one on the packet quite soon but the packet said it could take ten days just for the seed to germinate.

Room 9 must be good gardeners because our seeds germinated in just 4 days. We had a good strike rate too. Most pots were full of little sprout poppies.

Poppies don't really like to be transplanted but that is what we will be trying to do later in the year.

There were some very proud seed mums and dads in Room 9. Room 9 will teach Room 8 how to plant the poppies so they can join us transplanting the seedlings around the school to remind us of our returned service men and women all year round.

Wrapper Free Snacks for Room 9

We have been noticing things all term and now it was time to do something about what we've noticed. Our maths investigation of rubbish in the school grounds revealed that most rubbish was from lunch wrappers and gladwrap. Room 9 came up with a solution to use little containers for our snacks rather than having snacks that needed wrapping. We designed these with Miss Allnutt and can't wait to use them. If they crack or break they can be recycled but until then we will reuse, reuse, reuse. Marley told us that she gets some good reusable lunch wrappers online, she wraps her sandwiches in them everyday, maybe making some reusable sandwich wrappers could be a future project for the green team. It was a great way to end the term by creating a solution for a problem we had observed.

African Drumming-Listening Carefully

 Room 9 have been discussing 'Observation' a lot this term and how to be an explorer of the world.

This term, these have been our rules to learn by:

• Always be looking.
• Everything is interesting- look closer.
• Notice patterns.
• Make connections.
• Use all of your senses (safely) in your investigations: look, listen, smell, touch and taste. 

We have mostly focused on the first four, but today was all about listening and noticing patterns. 
Thank you Mrs Fry for organising these special lessons. 

Tiddlywinks Treat

 Room 9 filled their marble jar - awesome teamwork Room 9!

As a reward the children voted on a boys vs girls game, so Mrs Walker had to think of one.

I decided everyone would love tiddlywinks and I was right. Lots of the children hadn't seen the game before so they really enjoyed it.

We included it in our math focus on Friday. Each team (boys and girls) had a player go up and flick their tiddlywink. If they were not happy with their shot, they got one more chance but you had to accept your second score.

Mrs Walker wrote a scale of centimeters on the carpet with chalk (sorry Mr Hogg). The children got a great sense of distance between 2 and 3 metres. We discussed the likelihood of getting a 4 or 5 metre jump and everyone agreed it was unlikely but we couldn't say it was impossible- we've been reading a book about probability, can you tell?

 Then we ran into a problem, the boys were outraged that there were more girls in the class and William was away so it was even more unfair.

We needed a solution:

Ashley said why don't four more boys just have a go. The boys agreed and chose the four boys who had made the longest jumps. They chose Jacob who got a massive jump more than three metres- more of a roll than a jump.

Then the girls decided that wasn't fair because the boys would probably get big jumps again.

We had to work out a fair way to pick. Jacob thought that Mrs Walker could pick but some boys thought it wouldn't work because she was also a girl.

Mrs Walker told the children about picking randomly and we selected four boys at random.
Jacob was one of them, and on the second go all of the boys improved their jumps by a lot. The girls were worried.

Each thinking partner pair got a calculator and added up both the boys and girls totals. They were very careful and systematic, everyone did it three times and were surprised at how easily you could get the wrong result.

The pairs worked out some excellent ways to record each total and we were all happy that we had the correct totals as most groups ended up with the same totals for most of their calculations.

In the end the boys had the largest total. Then Mrs Walker demonstrated how to work out the average. We divided the totals by the number of girls and then the boys total by the number of throws the boys had. Guess what, the girls had the greater average.

Two winning teams, thanks to maths.

Expressions

On Friday, Room 9 works on mathematical challenges, tasks, problems and activities which gather all of our collective ideas and make us use our understandings in different ways. The key part of this learning is using and communicating our understandings. This week we looked at algebra and different ways we could express number values. For us that means using the numerals and signs we know to write/communicate (or express) values in different ways.

Lots of the children noticed patterns they could use to find lots of different expressions.

 The children always work with their thinking partners for these tasks. They were free to move around the room and contribute to any of the sheets of paper with number values written at the top.

 They were very engaged in the task and loved making so many connections with each other and with their mathematical understandings.

Found Alphabet and Numerals

Our next task at looking closely was to find letters and numerals where we didn't expect to find them. The image below is the alphabet that adults have put together. Whole teams of people do alphabet and numeral hunts all over the world. I think some of ours are just as good. The children were very creative and all of the team work and co-operative skills we have been discussing and trying to build were so evident.

Found Alphabet, Pintrest

O

Y

T

X

A

Y

B

F

H

Another O

X

A Real Find - No one in Room 9 would ever do this however.