Book Character Dress Up Day!

What a fantastic way to end a brilliant BOOK WEEK! Dress up any day is always a fun day! And we LOVED IT!!

Have a great weekend everyone!

Monument Book Fair!

Students had a great time browsing through the books at the 'Monument Book Fair' there was so much to choose from and it was difficult at times to make a decision.

Mystery Reader 

Today we had Ms Rachel come to our class to be our mystery reader. We have been so lucky this week having had so many different people to share a story with us!

Candle Light Read Aloud

What a lovely time we had tonight at school for the Candle light read aloud. Was great to listen to so many stories being read in many different languages. Of course we can't forget the delicious biscuits we got to eat at the end of the night!

Don't forget it is 'Book Character' dress up day tomorrow!

A Session With The Visiting Author

In the knowledge centre ready to listen to David Schwartz share with us about how he writes stories, where he gets his ideas from and what the main ingredient to a good story is.

Mr David spoke to us about how he writes books and shared with us - Super Grandpa.

He read the story to us with lots of expression, fun and questions. The story had a lot of problems that we had to identify and at the end we reviewed the story and plotted where the problems were and how they were solved. This will be very helpful when it comes to writing our own realistic fiction books!

Mystery Reader

The students came back from lunch today to see this mysterious person sitting in our room!

They knew the person looked familiar, but couldn't quite figure out who it was!

Until....

He removed his disguise which revealed it was Mr Garrett from Grade 5 that was going to read to us! We were treated to two books. Mr Garrett had the class rolling around the floor laughing one minute and shaking in fear the next!

Thanks for the brilliant story telling Mr Garrett! All the students would love for you to come back again!

Tomorrow look out for yet another mystery reader coming to our class. Also it is our turn to go shopping at the Monument Book Fair. Please check the email sent out for information regarding this.

Poem In My Pocket!

Another great day with lots going on for #bookweek - Take a look at all the things we did today!

We all had a poem in our pocket, and some very brave children shared their poems with the class this morning.

We also went to see our buddies and shared our poems with each other. Our grade 4 buddies are great listeners and very helpful when we come across words we're not sure about.

We also got to have a sneak peek at our collaborative book that has been making it's way through the elementary school. It is awesome!

Realistic Fiction

We also wrote and published our very first class realistic fiction book. We will be sharing it with you very soon on Seesaw! Everyone worked very hard to collaborate together to write and illustrate our book 'Pearlie Proud'.

Mystery Reader

We were very lucky to have Ms. Ethel come and visit us from secondary and be our mystery reader today. She shared with us one of her favourite books 'Olivia'. It was a hilarious book that had us all laughing! 

We also did a little activity where we got to draw one of Ms. Ethel's favourite animals - a pig. All we had to do was draw a pig before we even got to listen to the story. But as the story went on and we discussed what was happening, then we knew what we needed to do. Add to our pictures something that 'Olivia' loved! 

Tomorrow we get to have a session with our visiting author. Stay tuned for the update!

Book Week - Visiting Author!

What a great way to kick off #isppbookweek with an assembly by our visiting author - David M. Schwartz

He has written many different books but they all have one thing in common - wonderings with a splash of maths. 

Two lucky students from our class were called up onto the stage to help Mr. Schwartz solve one of his wonderings. Well done Aoife and Albert for being such awesome risk takers!

We also got to count and add popcorn! How much does a million pieces of popcorn look like? Well we thought a lot! So we set to work counting.....we didn't have a million pieces of popcorn but we did see a photo of a school in America that did have a million pieces of popcorn and it was HUGE! Mr Schwartz did however have bags with 1 piece, 10 pieces, 100 pieces, 1000 pieces, 10,000 pieces and another picture of a bag with 100,000 pieces in it!

It was HUGE!

Highlights from our week!

Mystery Reader

A very big THANK YOU to Lisa Walker (Owen's Mum) for coming in on Wednesday to be our mystery reader. It was an absolute delight to see Owen's face register that his mum was sitting in our classroom. We were treated to a great story by one of our favourite authors Dr Seuss. The children were such great listeners and thoroughly enjoyed having a visitor reading to them.

The children are very proud when they have a parent, relative or friend come in to read. Please don't miss out on the chance to share a story or a fun activity with our class. 

Follow this link to sign up:

Mystery Guest - Sign Up

Realistic Fiction

Ms Rachel came to our class on Thursday to introduce to us a style of writing called Realistic Fiction. We looked back over a book that we were very familiar with 'Wemberly Worried'. We took the story apart and filled in a 'story mountain' planner. This is where we talked about the characters, setting, build up, problem, resolution and ending. Ms Rachel explained to us all of these things and then together we decided to make up our own realistic fiction story using the story mountain planner. We have called our story 'Pearlie Proud', we are just in the planning stages but we will share our published piece soon!

Maths

Adding 3 numbers together with a partner. Explain your thinking and show how you worked out the answer. It was really interesting at how differently the students came to solve the equations. 

Buddies

Always enjoy spending time with our Grade 4 buddies. This week we started to made puppets for our puppet theatre. We will be making short role plays showing various interactions in the coming weeks. Watch this space!

Hope you have all had a great weekend! Ready to start book week!

Book Week!

Monday 20 - Friday 24 November

There are many activities planned for next week, including working with our visiting authors, David Schwartz and Kate Klise, parents reading in their mother tongue every day, Poem in Your Pocket, Drop Everything And Read, creating collaborative books, Candlelight Read Aloud, Monument Books sales, Rate It! and Review It!, Book Drive for Green Umbrella, and so much more! Click here for the Elementary Parent Book Week Brochure that you also received in an email this week.

There is also a 'Character' dress up day on Friday. The children can come to school dressed in their favourite book character. We will have an assembly first thing in the morning followed by a parade of all our wonderful costumes.

Please help your child to look at different books and decide on a costume they would like to wear. It is a great way to finish the week and everyone really gets into the spirit of it all!

Here is a overview of what will be happening next week.

Monday
Mystery Reader
Opening assembly
D.E.A.R - Drop Everything And Read

Tuesday
Mystery Reader
Poem in your pocket day
D.E.A.R - Drop Everything And Read

Wednesday
Mystery Reader
Visiting author workshop
Door decorating judging
D.E.A.R - Drop Everything And Read

Thursday
Mystery Reader
D.E.A.R - Drop Everything And Read
Monument book fair - If you would like your child to purchase a book please give them some money before school. I can look after it for them. 

Candlelight Read Aloud - 6pm

Friday
Closing Assembly
Mystery Reader
D.E.A.R - Drop Everything And Read
Book Day costume parade

Short But Busy Week!

Maths

We had a great calendar question this week - 'Who can jump the farthest in your class?'

We went outside to find out the answer.

After many fine efforts and a few recalls "Timo" was the winner! Congratulations Timo :-)

Explain Everything

Mr Matt our IT coach also came to visit us and introduced the class to an awesome app called 'Explain Everything'. He showed us one of the many great things we can do - we now know how to cut out a picture and add it to the Explain Everything app and add text and movement. Ask your child about what they did. They all had an absolute laugh experimenting with this application.

Central Idea

Together with Mr. Jon we looked at our new Unit of Inquiry and what our central idea is. We unpacked this idea so we could have a better understanding of what the keywords meant. 

Birthday Celebrations

Finally, we helped our friend Valerie on Monday celebrate her seventh birthday. We hope you had a great day and thanks for the delicious homemade cookies :-)

and also Kongkea had her birthday on Monday too! Thanks so much for the delicious cupcakes :-)

Hope you all enjoyed your weekend!