We had a special day at school today.  Today it was Mrs. Mosbauer’s birthday and it was also our Class Reward Day because we filled our Marble Jar.  As a reward we chose to have a costume day.  We all came dressed as our favourite person or character.

In the afternoon, the parents presented Mrs. Mosbauer with a beautiful scarf and some pansy plants for her garden at home.  She was so happy to receive the plants because she has the perfect place to put them.  She thanked all the parents for the beautiful gift.

We also made a special book for Mrs. Mosbauer during our writing time but it was a big secret.    It was a book of poetry about Mrs. Mosbauer.  We included lots of different types of poems including cinaquains and acrostic poems. She was very amused with some of the interesting verbs used liked, “ravenous” and “famished”.  We all love Mrs. Mosbauer and her terrific sense of humour!  We hope she had a lovely day!

Birthday Time! on PhotoPeach

On Friday we celebrated Numeracy Week by having a special day of activities.  Our best activity was the “Name Value Challenge” across the school.  Each person had to add the value of each letter in their name and we then added all these together for 2TM. eg. A=1 B=2  Miss Chiodi then collected all the values for each class in the school.  The total value of all our names was 1,713. 

First we worked out our own name value and then we challenged ourselves by adding the names of our table group together.  This was very tricky.  Lots of us used MAB blocks to help us work out the answer. We needed to count all the hundreds, tens and ones carefully.

In the afternoon, we had a games sessions.  Lots of us brought in games such as Monopoly, Trionimoes, Uno, and Chess which all used some kind of mathematical thinking.  Ms. Tieppo also read us the story of “Rudie Nudie” and we created our own timeline for the story.

Here are some things we said about Numeracy Day:

• loved playing with friends
• you needed to be fair
• it was fun adding up all the money
• you need to add the dice numbers carefully
• counting the MAB blocks was tricky
• you needed to swap some tens for hundreds when the number got bigger
• it was important to work as a team.

 Our Numeracy Day! on PhotoPeach

Art Gallery Excursion on PhotoPeach

Last Thursday our class went to the National Gallery in Federation Square in Melbourne.  We have been learning about the famous Australian Heidelberg artists such as Frederick McCubbin and Tom Roberts.  They used to paint in our local area of Heidelberg.

We travelled by train into the city.  The Metro staff helped us to get on and off the train safely. It was so exciting being on a Metro train.

We learned so many things about art from our guides.  Here are things we think are important.

• Every picture or art work tells us a story.
• An artist can use a variety of materials or mediums to create their artwork.
• You need to read the plaque next to the art work to find out about the artist and their story.
• The Indigenous artists place their canvas on the floor and they can paint their environment because they know it so well.
• You can learn a lot about history by looking at a painting.
• There is a special alarm in the Gallery to protect the paintings.  You need to be one arms length away from the wall.
  
• The gigantic elevator is used in the gallery to move pieces of art.
• Lots of Australian art is stored away in special rooms.  It is wrapped in a special tissue paper to protect the colour in the art work.

Have you ever been to an Art Gallery?  What did you see?