The dream of the thylacine

Today we read another of the shortlisted books for book week. The Dream of the Thylacine explores the extinction of the Tasmania Tiger. Margaret Wild and Ron Brooks have done an amazing job to capture what they thought the thoughts of the last Tasmania Tiger may have been. We were captivated by the transition from dark gloomy pages to bright colourful dreaming pages.

Below is our thoughts about the book using a webpage called Wallwisher

CLick on the website to go to our thoughts http://wallwisher.com/wall/thylacine

Viking Helmets

Over the past couple of days we have been making viking helmets.
First we read the story 'The Lost Viking' by Norman Jorgensen and James Foley.

You can check out the blog with everything to do with the book by clicking here.
Here are some pictures of us working on our helmets.

Here is a slideshow of the finished products

We put the helmets out on display in the corridor

We got little cards given to us by Mrs Kowalski with random numbers on them. We had to put ourselves into groups. We needed to get into a group of 3 where all 3 numbers made a connection. the connection had to be multiplication and division. 2 multiplication facts and 2 division facts. Then we created a 'making connection' chart and it has 2 multiplication facts on the top and divsion facts on the bottom. We created an array in the middle. We've put some photos below to show you these charts.

By doing this activity lately these are the major things we have learnt so far...
* Factors - which are a list of numbers that you can use to multiply to give you a product.
* Products - the answer to a multiplication fact
* multiplication can always be proved by division because they are the opposite.
* if you know your multiplication facts you know know your division.

planet pictures

Today we created some pictures of earth and jupiter for our display.

Newspaper olympic art

After viewing this artwork above we created our own newspaper olympic silhouettes. The first step was to create a background using strips of paper cut into zig zags or curves. Using the strips we layered them onto of one another to fill the page and used water colour paint to create a contrasting background for our silhouettes.

To create the silhouettes we trawled through tonnes of newspapers to find olympians in action that would work for our artwork. After carefully cutting the images out, we were able to turn them over and paste them onto our backgrounds. To make the silhouettes stand out, we outlined them in black marker. We're very pleased with how they turned out. 

Our learning responsibility

This afternoon we wrote a whole class goal, outlining our responsibility in the classroom...

We promise to follow directions immediately. Be respectful to our teachers and not waste their time. We promise to listen to the teacher when they speak and not interrupt. We promise to mind others and think about other peoples feelings. We promise to be more mature and responsible and to appreciate the time and effort our teachers put in for us. We promise to be grateful for what our teachers provide.

As a class we aim to work hard to achieve this and remind each other through peer support when we break our promise.

Week 3

This week we spent a lot of our time doing Olympics activities.
Below are some pictures of us working on an artwork inspired by the work of Rachel Whiteread. This is her artwork.

We used electrical tubes and the olympic rings colours to create a picture of a sport or scene from London.

Whilst working with our buddies on Friday we were asked to design a new uniform for the Australian team. We thought it would be fun to turn our uniforms into little characters. Some of us haven't finished yet, but here are the ones that are completed.

Grace Bowman

Today we were lucky enough to have a visit from an Australian Paralympian. Grace Bowman represented Australia in the Equestrian in 2008 at Beijing and she will fly to London at the end of August to represent us again. She told us her heartbreaking story and how she used her journey to inspire and determine her even more to be stronger each year. She also inspired us to help us achieve our goals academically and personally. Here is a video of a movie Grace showed us about the paralympics.

Mrs Kowalski also took lots of photos as she was speaking to us