Sunday, August 30, 2009

1/2M News


What a busy term! The children have been working very hard on our ‘Minibeast’ unit, listening to stories such as ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’, making insects in craft and learning about the life cycles of some of them, such as butterflies. We have also been discussing nouns, verbs and adjectives within the context of minibeasts, which will help us when we write our explanation texts soon. We were very proud of our 2nd Place in the ‘Jewel on the Newell’ Science Week competition, and would like to especially thank Ben and Asher (our presenters) as well as Mrs Stiller and Mrs Bromage who accompanied the boys on the day! Ben and Asher talked about our bean plant experiment and discussed the results of their investigations about what plants need to grow’.

Mrs Davis has been teaching the class about the ‘shelters’ that people and animals use, and she has helped us finish a spectacular quilt, which was on display at the fete last week. Mrs Jackman has helped the students make some magnificent grass seed heads (a distant relative to Cousin It!). We enjoyed the Athletics Carnival recently and congratulate Will and Taylor for making it to the Zone Athletics. Good luck to Will, who will be running again at Tamworth soon in the North West PSSA Carnival. We are also hoping to have tennis for sport for the Year 2 children soon, so look out for a note that will come home with more information about this. Many children will enjoy the opportunity to learn new racquet skills.

Earlier this term we participated in a video conference with the author Frances Watts and thoroughly enjoyed listening to her stories, along with students from lots of other schools. Last week we also shared a narrative that we wrote using some special software with students from North Ryde Public School. Here are some of their recounts of the experience…….

On Tuesday, 1N and 1/2M went to the video conference room to watch the stories that we made. First we went for a jog and played ‘Duck, Duck, Goose’. Then we watched the stories that we made on ‘Create a Story’. Our story was ‘Spiky the Spider Finds a Friend’. 1/2D had a slightly different ending to ours. My favourite part was when North Ryde Public School showed their ending, At the very end we said ‘goodbye’. (William)

On Tuesday we went to a video conference and 1N came with us. North Ryde Public School from Sydney was on the screen. 1N’s story was ‘Tas-Kooka-Dragon’ and ours was ‘Spiky the Spider’. 1/2D and 1S were also there and we saw them on the t.v. My favourite part was the end of ‘Tas-Kooka-Dragon’. (Jonty)

On Tuesday we went to the video conference room. We sat in our lines. We watched ‘Tas-Kooka-Dragon’ first. Then we showed our story. I changed the page on the Smartboard and Harry read the story. My favourite part was when I changed the pages. (Asher)


All the children are becoming very excited about our trip to the Dubbo Zoo in a few weeks. Please don’t forget to send in your note and money as soon as possible.