This term we have a big focus on the arts.
As part of this we are learning to sing with Mrs Tasker on Wednesday afternoons.
She is teaching us to sing with wide mouths and is helping us to learn to stay in tune.
Today we worked on pronouncing the National Anthem correctly and we also sang some songs while Mrs Tasker played the guitar.
We can't wait until we do it again next Wednesday.

We had such an amazing visit from the SPCA Education staff today.
They brought along a dog called Bugsy and two guinea pigs.
Everyone had a turn at touching the animals.
We learned about how to take care of animals and how to approach animals so that we don't frighten them.

Today at maths we imagined we were shopping and everything in the store was half price.
The children were very good at reading the fraction 1/2 and they worked hard to work out the new cost of items.
During this lesson we discovered lots of children didn't know how to count money or how many cents there were in $1. This led to us spending some time counting money, discovering different ways to make amounts of money and other fun things. We are lucky because we have lots of coins that Sophie's Mum gave our class so we could use real money to count with - we imagined 1cent coins were 10 cents and 2 cent coins 20 cents and 5 cent coins were 50 cents, we used a counter to be our 20 cent piece.
At the end of the lesson I gave the children the opportunity to have a turn in the maths corner but almost everyone chose to stay counting coins!
My home challenge for the children is to have a go at counting coins and talking about different ways to make different amounts.

This week our class is in mixed up reading groups - everyone is doing a play. It is so much fun and so exciting to see the children so busy thinking about how they could use expression to make their character more interesting. They are creating actions and some children are even memorising their lines!
Today we were very lucky as we had Valda, Debbi, Nicky and I all able to work with one group at the same time.
Then the children shared their play with the class - we will be doing more sharing this week before we present our plays on Friday. We are working on plays for the next three weeks. This is to help  build confidence speaking in front of an audience - a skill that is a big focus with the poetry competition and performance focus for this term.

We had so much fun creating our costumes on Friday.
Huge thanks to the wonderful parents and grandparents who joined us.
The children did a wonderful job thinking about their design and creating a costume that looks just like their picture.
I was impressed with the problem solving and determination they showed during this task.
At the end of the day we shared each doll and compared it to the original design. It was wonderful to hear the children reflecting on their successes, identifying challenges and the solutions they found to the problems.
I was impressed with the way the children helped each other during this task.
 I can't wait until Monday when we paint our costumes.

Today the other maths group had a go at working out which bugs (and animals) they needed to have the right number of legs in a jar. 
It was fun using the toy bugs to help solve these problems.
These children impressed me with their problem solving strategies and their perseverance. 
It was fun listening to the conversations between the children and the creative solutions they found :)

Today we worked on developing both our story line and our costumes.
I am loving the enthusiasm the children are showing towards this project. 
Friday is going to be very exciting for the children as they begin to make their costumes.
I love the enthusiasm and the way the children have completely embraced this project, it is rather cute to have a whole class full of new 'people' as these characters are developing! (It has also created a few funny moments as children have been hunting for Lucy, George, Bella ... and I've been wondering who they are looking for!).
There has been a lot of oral language developing too as the children create scenarios and games for their characters to be part of.
It was interesting watching the children learn the difference between simply colouring their mannequin in and creating an outfit that fits on the outside of their 'skin' - I can't wait to see the finished designs on Friday.

Please remember to keep collecting little drink, sauce, soap etc bottles for our next project :) thanks

During maths today the children had a challenge - they had to work out which animals Old McDonald had on his farm based on the number of legs in each paddock.
I was impressed with the strategies the children used to solve these problems. There was some very logical thinking and some creative thinking too.
I was thrilled to see the children challenging each other and asking questions to check their friend's answers worked.

Our characters are really starting to come to life!
The children worked very hard today to create lists of words to describe their character - they had to think of words to describe what they look like, characteristics and things they like.
They then shared their ideas and we are all getting to know each character - and we are enjoying watching them develop.

Later in the day we began creating our costumes for our dolls. The children have totally embraced this challenge and are excited about Friday when we begin constructing our costumes using tinfoil and paint.

This term we have a big focus on The Arts.
Today we had fun playing with Barbie, Ken and Action Man dolls!
We were doing this because we are going to be creating some fantastic writing, art and other learning based on a character we create. Today we started to think about what our character looks like, their name, age, interests and things they like to do. We thought of words to describe our character. We used the dolls to help our imaginations and to feel like our character is a real person.
We all took turns at sharing our character with the class and also had fun interacting with other characters.
We will be developing costumes for our characters later in week and then we will start to write some great stories about them. We will also be making so iStop Motion movies using our characters.

If any children have a doll of their own to bring along I'd be very grateful.