Our Vegetable Patch

The Environment Leaders at our school taught us how to plant vegetable seedlings. We learnt about -

*how to seperate the seedlings
*how deep to dig the hole
*how much water to put on the seedlings
*how to push the soil in around the seedlings

Our class has made a worm farm as part of our taking action for this term. The juice from this farm will be used on the vegetable patch. When the vegetables have grown we are going to pick them and make vegetable soup next term. We will invite some people from our Parish to come for lunch and we will make vegetable soup for them using our home grown produce.

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

New Ways of Thinking

This morning we looked at the first page of 'Window' by Jeannie Baker. We are using this text to see the impact that humans have on an environment over time. Our class was asked to use three different levels of thinking  to discuss what we see in the picture (I see, I think, I wonder). These are some of our responses.



I See

• a blue lakes
• colourful butterflies
• fresh grass
• pretty flowers
• big bushes
• crunchy leaves
• a blue sky
• hopping kangaroos
• green and yellow trees
• little mud path
• wooden toilet

I Think

• the land is peaceful
• that I wouldn't cut trees down
• that the toilet is broken

I Wonder

• how I can protect the environment
• what the outside of Sam's house looks like
• how Sam's house has changed
• who made the pond
• if there are animals behind the trees
• how they made the swings on the tree

This was our first go at using this way of looking at an image. We look forward to improving with our descriptions and wonderings.

Learning Together

As part of our Community Arts Project we had the opportunity to learn more about phototgraphy from Middle MMY. They came to our classroom and taught us what they know about photography. After listening to the children we discovered that there are three different views that we can use to take a photograph and make a photograph look more interesting.
1. Worm's Eye View (this view makes something look bigger)
2. Bird's Eye View (this view makes something look smaller)
3. Middle View (we use this view the most)
We also learnt that you use a zoom to bring things closer or move them away. An important piece of information that we now know is that we have to take our time and be very still when we take photographs otherwise they will be blurry. We have to turn ourselves in to a bipod and have chicken wings to capture the best image that we can.
After listening to our mentors we then went outside and had a go at taking photographs using the three different views.
We had a great time learning with the Middles and now we are going to teach our parents how to take fabulous photos!

 Worm's View

Middle View

Bird's Eye View

Our Amazing Mazes

Today we were presented with the challenge of designing and making our own mazes for a marble to travel through. We used a shoe box lid, tape, scissors and cardboard.

This activity helped us to learn how to work as a team and cooperate and problem solve. It also helped us to learn about location and our 'left' and 'right'. We had to write our own instructions for people to follow when they had a go at playing with our mazes. Our instructions included location words (up, down, through, over, straight, left and right).
We had lots of fun creating our amazing mazes!

Our reading

Jasmine reads her story ( actually only some of it as it was pretty long !)

and Tessa responds



Peter reads his story




and Connor responds


We were testing out a new tool called AudioBoo - we can easily record ourselves talking and then embed it into our Blog. Now we are wondering - What else could we do with it ?

Museum Discoveries

What a magical day! We went to the Melbourne Museum and the sun was shining. We went in to the Bugs Alive exhibit and looked at an ANT COLONY. We found worker ants, an ant with wings and larva. Then we found the Tarantula section and we drew a female redback spider. It was amazing to see the webs that the spiders can spin with their silk. After that we explored the stick insect section. We counted 67 stick insects in one exhibit. There was a huge insect that looked like 'Lily' (our class pet).

While at the Museum we found answers to our wonderings -

• there were 'real' insects
• we did get scared by some of the spiders!
• we saw the biggest beetle in the world
• Will found a black house spider

We had a wonderful day exploring aspects of Science and Life.




WOW! Is this Lily?



Melbourne Museum Wonderings

We are going to the Museum tomorrow to find out more about BUGS. We are wondering ...

• What will be at the Museum? (Tessa)
• Will I get scared by anything? (Ben)
• Will there be 'real' insects? (Ruby)
• How many insects will be there? (Jasmine)
• Which bugs will be the biggest? (Adol)
• Will there be a black house spider? (William B)

We will let you know what we find out.