1 fish 2 fish 3 fish more.

Today we made origami fishies!  It was a little tricky but we soon got the hang of it. Now we have a fishy whiteboard!

 We also finished off our powerpoint presentations from last week.  We added coloured backgrounds, some transitions from page to page and we also animated the pictures and the text.  

 They look creepy but cool!  Take a look at Connor's work to get an idea of what weird and wonderful creatures exist in the depths of the ocean!

20,000 leagues under the sea

Today pretended to go on a voyage to the bottom of the ocean.  We were impressed that James Cameron dived 11Km into the Mariana Trench to the deepest place on Earth, 'Challenger Deep'

This morning we wrote funny radio conversations between a submarine and a boat.  You can listen to Calle and Morgan and also to Rici and Cameron.

This afternoon we also learned that in 1960 Don Walsh was the first person to reach the bottom of the ocean.

We also learned what 'Bioluminescent  Invertebrates' are!  Ask us and prepare to be impressed!

A wheely good day.

Today it was wheels day for the year 3s and 4s.  We brought in scooters and bikes.  It is to do with Travelwise and we are trying to avoid the car!  Wheels day was fun because people went crazy!  I hope we have another wheels day soon!

In writing we practiced speech marks by writing a telephone conversation.  Some were funny and some were cool and some were a bit weird!

In topic this afternoon we learned about the Midnight Zone which is 1000 to 4000m deep.  We learned that there are lots of invertebrates there.  An invertebrate is an animal without a spine. To help us remember this we listened to a song. 

What did you say? I just heard half of it!

Today in Room 11 we have been thinking about different ways to say the word, 'Said.'  We looked at lots of words that we could use instead and how they change the way we say a sentence and thought of when we would use them.  Tomorrow we will practice using speech marks and using these words to add feeling and detail in our sentences.

In maths we worked on fractions.  We can all read them correctly and can explain what they mean. We can also work out what fractions of shapes look like.  To practice, we wrote down some fractions that we know onto different faces of a cube and then drew pictures of that fraction.  Thanks to Jonathan and Connor for the pictures!

Room 11 is having problems!

Today we have been writing stories, we used this picture as a prompt...

We are getting pretty good at coming up with interesting problems and solutions for our stories.  Here are a few of the problems we wrote about today...

Sophia wrote: In the morning in a dangerous village a fangtooth was capturing people.
Lily wrote: In an underwater village a naughty crab was trying to hunt someone.
Rici wrote: In a mysterious underwater cave an orphan mermaid needed food.
Cameron wrote: A shark army was coming to try and conquer Atlantis.
Alex wrote: A quacking duck scared a snapper.
James wrote: In the morning a water dragon saw a whirlpool.
Calle wrote: A volcano was erupting and the city was going to go underwater.
Xanthe wrote: A horrible fish trapped a mermaid and took her to a secret dungeon.
Oliver wrote: In 10 years time a zombie was going after a human driving an underwater car.
Zara wrote: A mermaid tried to escape from an underwater car.
Pammi wrote: A dangerous eel was hunting a mermaid in her car.
Jonathan wrote: A king fish drove the fish from his village because they were too noisy.

Interesting stuff.  We also learned that good stories have clever solutions to the problems and shouldn't be solved too quickly or easily.

We are also continuing to improve our spelling.  We used dictionaries today to do a word study and for some of us, our spelling words include the prefix 'Un' (meaning not) and the prefix 'Dis' (meaning opposite)

Here are our words for this week

1) Undo                                6) Discover

2) Unkind                             7) Disallow

3) Unable                              8) Dislike

4) Unafraid                           9) Disappear

5) Unwell                            10) Disagree

Spelling Bee!

From the inky black sea to the inky black fingers!

This morning we used a website link from the topic page of our blog and visited a website that showed us lots of different creatures from the bottom of the ocean.  We we amazed by how weird some of them looked.  Some looked slimy, some looked scary and some looked awesome!

We started to copy and paste our favourite species into a powerpoint presentation.  Next week we will improve how the presentation looks.

Next we started to make prints of our favourite fish.  We cut card into a fish shape and added details like eyes, teeth, gills and fins as well as any special features like lights.  Then we covered it in ink and stamped it onto a piece of blank newspaper.  The cool thing is that we could use the stamp to make 3 identical prints!  We hope you like them, there are more to come next week!

Story time!

Today we finished writing the stories that we have been thinking about all week.  We recorded some of these stories and they are below for you to listen to.

Also today was very exciting because the new playground opened.  It was so much fun but very busy!  Hopefully we can play on it without waiting so long tomorrow.

This afternoon was topic.  We learned about the twilight zone (nothing to do with vampires or movies!) and found out that its only about 5 degrees C, which is very very chilly!, and goes from 200m to 1000m deep.

Once upon a time....

1 million years ago in a hot jungle there was an enormous zombie doing ballet!

Today we used the words that we wrote down on Monday to help us come up with story starts. 

We had a list of places, characters and times as well as adjectives.  We found it really easy to come up with a good starts and now we are going to use our best ones to write the rest of the story! 
We also did a book review where we had to give a summary of what our reading book was about and say why we liked it.

Finding perimeters

Rounding numbers

 In maths we drew around shapes and measured their sides.  Then we added up all the sides to find the perimeter.  We are getting very good at this.  Some of the groups have been learning about how you can round numbers up or down to the nearest 10.  For example 44 becomes 40 but 45 becomes 50.

Measuring and Reading

Today Room 11 were revising how to use a ruler to measure in mm.  We had to measure pictures of seashells and make sure that we got their length exactly right, not just 'sort of' right.

 We have also been busy working on spelling and reading and reviewing lots of different stories.  We even had a reading test with Mr Miller.

This afternoon was library.  We were very lucky to have Mr Edgerley, the master story teller, read to us again!

It was also nice to see Selina back at school today.  We are glad she is ok and hope that she gets her arm out of the sling soon!

Rain rain go away!

Today was a  very grim day, but we worked hard and tried our best to ignore the rainclouds.  And then we had a complete technical meltdown and the computers and whiteboard stopped working.  So today we unplugged and went, 'Old school!'

We brainstormed some settings, characters, adjectives and times.  This week we will turn these ideas into some great stories.  It was impressive to see the creativity of Room 11 last week and we are looking forward to more of the same!

We also spent some time looking at how speech marks were used and hunted for interesting examples in our reading books.  We know that if we use speech marks it makes our stories more interesting.

We learned about perimeters in maths and discovered that 2 shapes with the same area, don't have to have the same perimeter.  We also played a new game, 'Mystery Machine'.  We would put a number into the machine and see what number came out.  We kept on putting numbers in and checking the result until we could work out what the machine was doing.  Sometimes all it did was 'add 5' or 'minus 3' but sometimes it would 'double and add 1.' Tricky stuff!

Art

Art, a set on Flickr.

Today Room 11 were inspired by Room 16s art and we decided to recreate it. We watched a short video of an illuminous deep sea jellyfish that glowed like a firework. So we scribbled over a white page with lots of different wax crayons. Then we covered the page in black pastel. Next we scratched off some of the black to reveal the bright colours underneath. We like the effect and we hope you do too! Please enjoy the photos, they were taken by the students.

Funny Characters

In writing today we had to describe a character.  We drew a head and folded the paper and passed it on, then someone else drew the body and then someone else drew the legs.  Our characters looked funny and exciting.  We then wrote short stories about them.  Have a listen to Oliver's, Rahab's and Terri's. 

We also started a new book today.  We now have topic books too.  We all tried to remember one fact about the ocean.  We will see if we still remember them tomorrow!

Book Reviews

Today, Mr. Edgerley was our 'Super-Sub' Teacher because Mr. Miller was busy helping other teachers all day.  We learned about how to review a book and say who we think it is suitable for and what was interesting about the characters.

We also learned about homophones, which is when two words sound the same but mean different things and are spelled differently too.  Like, "I went by the shops to buy some apples."

Here is a good memory game that will also help us to learn some of these homophones

Get well soon Selina!

Today we made get well cards for Selina who broke her arm yesterday. We hope she will feel better soon. 

 

 Some of us finished off our gigantic watches and we all practiced telling the time. We are going to remember that the long hand is the minute hand because the word ‘minute’ is longer than the word hour. We’re finding it quite hard but we’re sure that soon it will just click and we will get it. We used a program called stop the clock that we can practice at home to get even better!

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