The Last Week!

This has been a very busy term for 4/5Navy and we are looking forward to finishing the term with a BANG! For the last two weeks we have been busily working on our individual inquires which aim to answer the question “How might we share our interests to extend our learning?” We have been working tirelessly to learn about the various things we are interested in and sharing our new knowledge with the community. It has been wonderful to have parent ‘experts’ in the classroom to help us as we work towards achieving great things.

This week we are holding the 4/5Navy EXPO. It will be running over two days and consist of a variety of events and must see items.

Students will be running a Café where they will be sharing their cooking creations, a cooking class and recipes. On Friday students will be sharing their creations, presentations and knowledge.

We look forward to seeing you there!

 

This week in 4/5Navy we say farewell to Mrs Giebels. She has been with our class since week one this term and we have really enjoyed having her with us. We have learnt lots from Mrs Giebels and we hope she has learnt a few things  from us too.

This term we have been learning all about plants, life cycles and adaptations in Discovery.  We are certainly expanding our vocabulary and are able to include words like adaptation, habitat, consumer and producer in our work. It is very important that we learn about and care for our environment, especially as the Ormeau community grows.

We redesigned the Domino today! What did you do?

Today students brought in their prototypes from our challenge yesterday which was "Could you design a new domino?".

 

We shared them this morning and then went about making our prototypes better. Then we were told that a fictional character acting as the CEO of Dominoes Australia would be coming in tomorrow morning to see why she should adopt our new domino design. With a clear task, context and audience we began prototyping a pitch. Initially we just wanted to feed forward on each others domino prototypes but after some practise we began to understand how to help each other improve just our pitch and then took every opportunity to do this including getting feed-forward from our peers, Mrs. Geibles, Mrs. McLean and then our Prep buddies.

 

Needless to say we are very excited to pitch our new domino designs tomorrow. This is a great opportunity to work individually and with others on our ability to use/give feed forward, think outside the box, speak to an audience, ask questions and continue to build our creativity.

 

Some of our new domino prototypes include:
Glass-rainbow-people(dots)-tiny-cone shaped domino
 

And many many more!

 

Paper-colourful-dog biscuits-large-rectangular domino

Wooden-plain-starry-traditional sized domino

 

Discovery

This term in Discovery we are looking at the life cycles, environments and adaptations. We have been attempting to grow beans in a variety of places and in a variety of conditions. So far some of our plants have flourished and some have done nothing except begin to smell. We have been analysing which conditions are best and the effects of giving our plants too much water or sun, etc.

Today we had to opportunity to plant our growing beans and plant more seeds, in the school's garden beds. Now that we have analysed what enables the bean to grow we are confident that we will have a budding crop of Broad Beans very soon.

District Cross Country

Students from 4/5Navy were privileged enough to represent themselves and their peers at the District Cross Country. It was fantastic to see them showing the 5C's and team spirit. They all tried their best and should be very proud of their efforts. A big thank you to the parents who were there to support their children on the day!

Navy News - Wk 4

This was a very busy week and Caitlin and Kaila are ready to tell you all about it in this week's Navy News report! http://db.tt/FJKdaJCC

Happy Mother's Day

Week 3 - Term 2

This week we learnt about many interesting things including the domino effect and we played dominoes in groups. On Wednesday we had buddies with the preps. We taught them how to play dominos.

We also learnt how to use Microsoft Excel to create a bar graph in maths. This was a very challenging activity because Mrs McLean wouldn’t tell us how to do it but we eventually worked it out by ourselves.

 

In maths we did some subtraction on the whiteboard with magnets and solved math problems in our books. In P.E we played Lacrosse and we also had music and Indonesian. Mrs Kerrins taught us about different tastes in Indonesian and we even tried a chilli!

This week we got a new collage trolley because all of the red tubs that go onto tables got way too messy. Thank you Mr Kerrins for putting it together for us.

We watched a video about a frogs and their lifecycle. After we watched the video we had to make a photo story which explained what was happening. Many of the seeds we planted last week are growing strong but some which did not get light or too much water are struggling.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today we went on a real life expedition! It was a great opportunity for us to show our own explorer spirit and try and use bravery, courage and problem solving.

 

Mr Kerrins(Principal) arrived at our classroom with a truck full of things we could take on our expedition into the unknown. We had five minutes to choose any item we thought we might need or use on our travels and to get ourselves ready. Needless to say we chose some very interesting things! But how would we transport all of these things?

 

Once we began our journey we quickly found out that a cart full of equipment would fall over and that a wheel barrow was difficult to manoeuvre over rocks. However we continued on through the bushland until the team finally reached the pond. Once there we explored the surrounds and set about trying to gauge the depth of the pond.

 

We quickly began to understand that being an explorer was not an easy occupation and would have been extremely challenging. Finally we packed up all of our equipment and returned to the classroom very tired and proud of our achievements.

 

 

Overall a very enjoyable expedition!

(ACHHK078)

 

 

 

Today we had a special visit from Mr Tom Barratt. He worked with us in our Discovery Time and helped us to come up with lots and lots of fantastic ideas. We are now going to use our mathematic knowledge to help us to make some prototypes.

Exploring the Unknown!

This week in 4/5 Navy we became explorers! After watching ‘A Pep Talk’ we focused on the ‘Two Paths’ mentioned in the poem by Robert Frost. We went out into our school grounds and found two paths, one of which was less travelled and explored what it would have been like for explorers who were constantly on the path less/never travelled. We tried to leave our mark on the environment we were in by writing our names. It was hard because we did not have a pen or paper or any other conventional writing tools. However in the end we saw the possibilities in the things around us and once we started to see the possibilities it was hard to stop.

 

We returned the this part of our school later  in the week and were surprised to see that some of our names remained and some had disappeared with the rain. We then took a snapshot of something that we could see and sketched what we saw. It was important that we included a description of our snapshot so that we could really get all of the details correctly recorded. Initially we found our descriptions to be very simple but after some feedback from our peers we had specific and helpful ways to improve our writing.

 

Later in the week we thought it would be interesting to contrast the things we left behind in our unexplored environment to those things that allow us to know an explorer has been somewhere. So we set about finding answers to the open question ‘How do we know an explorer has been somewhere?’ We found this very exciting and recorded all of our findings in our OneNote Notebooks.

 

Our exploration and discoveries have only just begun but we are very excited for what is yet to come.

 

Stay Tuned!

 

A new year, new beginnings, new responsibilities!

Since starting school in 4/5 Navy, we have been very busy. Many things are new to us such as our classroom, Class Dojo, Mrs. McLean our teacher, and our classmates.

We started the year by establishing our class expectations and defining what makes a good strong choice and how to avoid making weak choices. These will help us to have a successful year where we can grow and learn together in a safe and supportive environment.

We began looking at different ways of organising and categorising different ideas or information. This allowed us to start making connections using SOLO Taxonomy which allows us to express our level of understanding and the sophistication of our thinking. From there we looked at classifying different types of questions (open and closed/googleable and not googleable) these skills will be very helpful in our Discovery Time.

We have continued our Immersion Phase (Design Thinking) by looking at images and maps from past explorers. In this phase we are looking to develop empathy and build understanding of others through experiences. We found it an interesting contrast to the life of Tom Appleby (Jackie French - Fictional Character) and the difference that having a chance for goodbye makes. After looking at maps from the past we then began to create our own map of Australia and are looking forward to the challenges that this exercise in excellence brings. Our immersions into explorers also lead us to create a 7m long timeline which we will be using to sequence significant events as we learn about them.

We are looking forward to the rest of the year.

We are flexible learners!