Time lines

We started making personal time lines today. We ruled up our paper and marked 10yrs in 10 cm blocks. We had to work out elapsed time between our own birthdays and other events in our lives like our siblings birthdays.  We found it pretty challenging.

We decided it would have been easier if we had 12cm blocks for each year. We are going to do our final time lines using 12cm blocks and writing in each month to help us figure exactly where each event needs to go.

Some of us used strategies like working together to get the job done.

6 traits of writing

We are learning how to be great writers.

We have been learning about ideas.

We have been using photos to prompt ideas for writing. We have taken one boring sentence and made it more exciting to trigger masses of ideas for stories based on just that one sentence. 

We have a new resource to help us remember the 6 traits of good writers, our writing iPod:

Thanks to We are Teachers for the free posters.

The enormous crocodile

We have read The Enormous Crocodile by Roald Dahl. We made our super enormous crocodiles and have some up on the wall now. We worked collaboratively to complete our crocs.

(Find the template here.)

Swimming

We have been spending some of our afternoons learning to swim in preparation for swimming sports. 

Moving into week 4

Wow! This term is flying by.

Literacy

We are further developing our skills to rewrite questions as statements during reading work. We have been answering  questions about the texts we are reading using the questions in our answer. The aim is that our statements are informative; anybody can read our answers and know what we are talking about. We have also been learning how to create posters with a target audience in mind. 

Our focus in writing is 'ideas'. 

We have been learning how to use our dictionaries and thesauruses to help make our writing ideas more interesting. We have taken one student sentence (from a photo prompt) and brainstormed as a class to make it more exciting. We were all pretty inspired with our new potential sentence and spent some time drawing our own visual interpretations of it. 

We have started to look at author's purpose and recognise that authors write to persuade, inform or entertain (PIE). This concept will help us not only identify the intent of other writers but identify how to shape our own writing. 

We have been able to categorise different writing such as magazine advertisements and fairy rales using PIE. 

We have also been using our thinking skills to reflect on things we have learnt in class. We have started with lower order thinking such as remembering and how we have used our memories to help new learning in class. We have used this in our writing and to reflect on maths learning. 

Maths

We are learning about time, specifically elapsed time ( see the earlier post about time). 

Here are our clock time lines to help us work out elapsed time problems. 

We will take the opportunity to use time and clock faces to help us learn the 5 times tables. 

Time

We are learning to figure out elapsed time problems. Some of us are still learning to tell the time so we have had some challenges.

We started with some group work learning about telling the time to the quarter and half hour. We have looked at analog and digital time. 

Yesterday we started a qr code challenge. We found cards pinned around the room and figured out the time shown. When we had found all the cards we used iPads to scan the qr codes so we could check our answers. 

Some of us had a go at some more challenging time problems, but we found it pretty difficult. 

Today we made some clock timelines to help us work out elapsed time problems. We made our timelines and wrote down all the things we knew about time. We talked about how time was different from base 10 math, but we could still use skip counting in 5s or 10s to help us.

Finally we worked on a couple of elapsed time problems. 

Goal setting

Our goals for the year are starting to go UP!

We have been looking at our literacy and maths achievements so far and planning goals to reach at the end of 2014. 

Some of our goals are pretty high, so we are going to be working hard and in the end we will certainly be flying!

Homework challenge

We have got to the end of our first homework challenge. It was based on the Sochi Olympics. We had to pick a country attending and complete a range of tasks. The results are up on the wall and looking good.

Pencil holders

We have started the year with some recycling. We have made pencil cup holders out of recycled plastic bottles.

We papier mached the bottom of plastic bottles and painted them. Now we have containers to hold our jovis and pencils.