Where is the year going?

Term 3 and right back into the swing of it! After a quick catch up in the morning we got straight into work!  As part of our HSIE unit 'Australia You're Standing In It' we are looking at literature from Australian author's that focus on our wonderful country. We found out what the class knows about Australia before we start Alison Lester's beautiful book, 'Are We There Yet?' which takes us on a journey around Australia. The book is illustrated with rich, colourful pictures that add more meaning to the text and give us a chance to not only look at a range of figurative language in the book but also at visual literacy and the meaning of the pictures.

We also started our class novel by Emily Rodda, titled, 'Bunga Witta'. This is a story about a small outback community of 12 who are living through a drought and their journey to bring money to their town. They decide to create a festival to encourage tourists to come to the town and bring their tourist dollars with them which should hopefully stop the town from dying. We discussed many experiences in the book and without students realising they had made many connections to the text and themselves. A perfect opportunity to remind students about the different types of connections you can make with a book which helps with comprehension.

Luckily the rain held off and we had recess outside. Everyone was so happy to be catching up with friends! We came in and it was time for computers and some poetry writing! We used a poetry intereactive site which helped us think of phrases and then put these together to write a poem that fit into a shape. We had lots of soccer balls, netballs, trees, clouds and hearts. Here is a link to go and check it out:

www.readwritethink.org/files/resources/interactives/theme_poems/

As it was the first day back we weren't rushed out of the computer room which gave us a chance to finish our poems and print them out. Back to the classroom we went to cut out our shape poem, decorate it and then stick it onto orange card. They look fabulous!

After lunch we gave out the Earthkeeper's Camp Note and then the newsletter before beginning our maths lesson on numbers, the meaning of expanded notation and a discussion about the biggest numbers we knew. We got to a trillion! What a big number that is! It's not even one we can imagine!!

What a great first day back!