A new term!

Welcome back to a new term everyone - especially parents and family friends.  Here are a few of the things we did today to kick start a lot of new skills and inquiries for the term.

This afternoon we had a tuning in session for our unit on weight and capacity.  Each team had to estimate any material as accurately as they could to 500 grams.  Here are some of the efforts below but there were some groups that used water and were very close!

This group found a discus that had the weight written on it!  Very clever...except they forgot to take the weight of the cup into account.  Doh!  So close.

We learned that the first people started using water as a common weighing material because everyone had it and it was easy to compare.  We discovered that 1 ml of water equals 1 gram of weight - so that means 500mls is the same weight as 500 grams.  Clever.

We also started a new CSI unit on 'synthesizing' today.  CSI is what we are using to discover new strategies for reading comprehension.  This text, "Black Beauty" helped us learn that the key words we know or don't know can be important when helping us summarise a text.  We want to better at this when we're reading independently!  Ask us to explain what synthesizing is...

We also looked at our 'learning words' for the week - doing my best.  This animation about a determined kiwi gave us some thoughts about striving for our best effort in everything we do.  Tomorrow we'll be setting some goals that will give us something to aim for!

Lastly - our 'Nothing Much' movie was featured on a national education website, 'Core Education's' blog.  This was quite an honour for us - it was great seeing some positive feedback from other teachers and educators via their comments, too.

 If you didn't see this it would be well worth your time to watch.  I hope it gives you a little insight into our day and how busy we 'really are!'