OUR VISITORS FROM FAR NORTH QUEENSLAND

Today we had special visitors to our school. They were children from a primary school in Trebonne. 13 children came to our school, they were in year 4-7 and they were in the same class because their school only has 25 children in it. The other 12 children are in P-3, they stayed back at their school.



The children are visiting Bribane and are staying here for a week. They came down with their teacher, principal and some parents. They wanted to visit a "city" school to see how different or similar it was to their school and to tell us about what their life is like living in a small town.





We found out that most of the children ride quad bikes or motorbikes around their farms, they fish with crocodiles and can't just walk next door to play with their neighbours because their neighbours could be a 15 minute drive away or even further.





Their school is much smaller than ours - they only have an office, a library (which is a classroom) and two other classrooms, and a small area to play in. This is very different to our school which has around 360 children in it, 14 classes, a library, office, hall, tuckshop and multi-purpose room we use for drama and music, plus we have 3 play areas.





Our lives are very different but we still enjoyed doing the same kinds of things. We hope our new friends keep in contact with us.

Silent Reading

Silent reading is when we read a chapter book by ourselves silently.We do it just about every day.Murphy is Reading Star Wars The Revenge Of The Sith by Mathew Stover. Tia is reading The Key To Rondo by Emily Rodda. Danah is reading When Santa Fell To Earth by Corneilia Funke. Charlotte D is reading The Silver Train To Midnight by Hesba Brismed.Silent Reading is lots of fun!!!!

WHO IS THE MYSTERY ARTIST THIS TERM???

Hi Year 4 and 5, I hope you have all had a great holiday and you are all energized for our last term at school!!
I have created an Animoto for our new artist this term. I wonder if you can guess who he is? He is also another artist that I like. He has created a range of art work from paintings and sculptures to sketches and collage (paper cut outs). We will look mainly at his paper cut outs which he created when he was an older man. You could say that he drew with his scissors!!!
Leave a comment if you can guess who he is. A clue - he is a French artist!

JUMP ROPE FOR HEART

On Thursday we had our school jump off for JUMP ROPE FOR HEART. This term Year 2 and Year 7 have been studying health and fitness and decided to take part in Jump Rope For Heart. The whole school thought it would be great fun and a fantastic way of getting fit as well. All this term each of the classes have been busy practising their rope jumping skills and learning new tricks in preparation for the "JUMP OFF".

Some classes devised a whole class routine to a song but we decided to do our own individual or group routines to one song. We had some very talented skippers. We even had some of the teachers do a routine.

We were very proud of our efforts and the money we raised ($6000) will go towards heart research.

HOW DOES FLOODING AFFECT THE GROWTH OF PLANTS?

We have been investigating how different conditions can affect the growth and survival of plants. We really want to know how EXTREME weather conditions can affect the growth of plants. We will be asking our parents and neighbours how the drought in South East Queensland has affected plants in our gardens at home and at school.

We would like to know how the growth of plants is affected in a flood.
We thought that maybe Mr H's Year 5 class in Emerald could help us with this!

We have some questions that we think they might be able to answer. They could leave comments with their answers.

• What was the flood level?
• How long did it take for the water to go down?
• How long did it take to clean up the mess?
• Did any trees fall over because of the flooding? How many?
• Did any plants survive the floods, if so which ones/what kind? How many?
• Were there many plants left in the school grounds after the floods?
• Have some plants grown back?
• Did any older plants survive?
• Did any young plants survive?
• What did you notice about your gardens/school grounds?

Our 3D shapes

In Maths we made some 3D shapes. 3D stands for 3 dimensional. we made a cylinder, a cone, a triangular based prism, a rectangular based prism, a triangular based pyramid and a rectangular based pyramid. A pyramid has an apex which makes it that shape. A prism does not have an apex because they don't all connect in one place. The only shapes we made that can roll are a cone and a cylinder. The only way a shape can be a prism is if it has to bases that are parallel.

Our Vincent Van Gogh Pictures

This term we have been learning about the expressionist artist Vincent Van Gogh. We looked at some examples of his art work such as "Starry Night" and "Sunflowers". We discussed his style of painting and the techniques he used to create the illusion of movement. We used his ideas of wavy and curvy lines in his work to create our own pictures in the style of Vincent Van Gogh.

I thought it would be effective if we put our pictures into a slideshow using One True Media and use a song that was written by Don Mclean about Vincent Van Gogh called "Starry Night".

Make video montages at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Parts of a plant

I found these two pictures that label the parts of a flower and the parts of a plant. There have been some technical words used in the labelling of the plant that we haven't included in our diagram. There is also a technical word that we didn't include on our flower diagram. Can you find which words I am talking about?

Flowering plants

flowering plants

Year 4 and 5 have a look at what I found. It is called a "myplick". It is a slideshow that you can add music to and then post it to your blog. This is one I found about the parts of a flower. This could be another way to present information - maybe even the life cycle of your bean plant!!

HOW DO BEAN SEEDS GROW?

In class we have started our investigation into "How does extreme weather affect the growth of plants?" We decided that before we could answer this question we had to learn a bit about plants, how they grow and what they need to grow. We have started growing our own bean seeds and we will be taking photos of each stage of their growth so we can see the life cycle of a plant.
I have found a video from you tube that speeds up the growth of a bean seed. Olivia thought it would be good if we could actually watch it grow in "real time" but that would be to hard to observe so this video can show us what it's growth is like.