Five for Friday - What a term!!

Hi! It's been a while! I honestly can't remember a term that has been as full on as this one. There have been a number of things that have been happening that have contributed to me feeling super busy and a little overwhelmed. First and foremost I am now a home owner!! I am extremely terrified excited to now be part of the population that has a mortgage. Well not so much the mortgage part... I am also still studying (one semester to go, one semester to go, one semester to go) and I am the literacy coordinator as well. So lots happening!!

Today I'm linking up with Kacey at Doodle Bugs Teaching for Five for Friday. These things didn't all happen this week, it's more of a catch up. 

I thought to kick it off I'd share a photo of my little home :) I hope you like blue... I don't! I will be painting it as soon as I can. It's also in need of a new fence and a little work inside, but it's mine, and I've got plenty of time to fix it up. 

Our Inquiry unit for this term was all about Portland in the Past. We learnt so much about our special little town and the part in played in the early history of Victoria. As part of this unit the little wonders created murals depicting the different stages of Portland's development and presented it to the class.

The first group did 'Portland Before Settlement'

They included lots of native animals, aboriginals and their huts, as well as weapons the aboriginals would have used. 

 The second group did 'Edward Henty Arrives in Portland'.

They included sailing ships in the harbour as well as people whaling. They placed Henty's wooden shack on the grass, complete with pony paddock. 

 The third group did 'Early Life in Portland'.

They included the beach huts that lined the foreshore, pony rides on the beach, the train and train track and a lot less animals. They also placed our church up on the hill. 

 The last group did 'Portland Today'. 

They included the port, smelter, boat ramps, hospital, playground and skate park. This group went above and beyond with the detail in their mural. To be fair they were the group with the most knowledge about what it looks like. 

I was very impressed with how all my kids worked in groups and cooperated to get their mural finished. They delegated jobs such as painting, research and drawings. 

Whaling was a huge part of Portland's past and was an industry that we learnt quite a bit about. The little wonders were quite adamant from the beginning that they didn't agree with this process. As a response to what we had talked about, the children had to decide wether whaling was 'good' or 'bad'. Needless to say they all chose bad. They then had to come up with reasons why they chose this stand point and write them on these adorable whale outlines.

One of our art focuses this term was collage. I have recently found an AMAZING website called Deep Space Sparkle that has absolutely fantastic art ideas that are organised by technique and grade level. It's run by a super talented art teacher named Patty who has a plethora of incredible art lessons available for free as well as paid options. We used her Foil Turtle and Fish Collage lesson to create these aluminium foil collages. 

Our writing genre for the past few weeks has been information writing so we began our unit with a whole class focus on frogs. You could ask my little wonders absolutely any question about frogs and I'm confident they could answer it. We listened to songs, watched videos and read books about frogs to learn as much as we could. 

At the beginning of the focus I created this display at the back of our room. It had all the stages of the frog's life cycle as well as key words they kids were able to access when they were writing. 

(I'm secretly loving the heck out of it!)

 To finish our frog focus we created these froggy diaries on TPT that were created by Teacher's Breathing Space. I love how they are written from the frog's point of view. It was such a great way to see how much the children knew about all the stages of the frog's lifecycle. 

FYI if you're doing anything about frogs, watch this video about metamorphosis and this one about amphibians. My kids LOOOVED them!

Another art activity we have done this term was based around a book by Kevin Sherry called 'The Best Artist in the Ocean'. It's about a giant squid that loves to be artistic and messy, despite the complaints of the other animals. We did a guided drawing of our squids, before painting them with water colours. Once they were dry the little wonders went over their grey lead lines with black ink. I have done this lesson before and the kids just love it. I love how different all the squids look, and how CUTE!

Thanks for stopping by and checking out what we've been up to. Hopefully next term will be more settled and I'll have more of a chance to keep up with it all.

Head over to Doodle Bugs to check out what everyone else has been up to.

Happy blogging :)

Learning to Learn in 2015

We're four weeks into our 2015 school year and I'm exhausted! The first two weeks I felt great, but this week I've hit a wall. I'm sure this happens to most teachers, the sheer shock of going back to work after 5 weeks of absolutely nothing. But enough about that, heres a look at a few of the things we've done during our first weeks back!

One of the first things we do is talk about the things that make a good student. A book that I always read at the beginning of the year is 'The Interrupting Chicken' by David Ezra Stein. 

It's a gorgeous picture book about a little red chicken who asks her papa to read her a bedtime story, but she can't help interrupting and spoiling the ending. It's a fantastic story to reinforce the importance of waiting patiently and not interrupting when people are talking. As a response to the book the children coloured in a picture of a chicken and stuck it in their book. Around it they wrote qualities of a good student, e.g. listening, taking turns, sitting quietly, raising their hand etc. 

One of the first things we do when we start a new year is write our holiday recounts. I found this super cute 'Here Come the Sun' summer craftivity pack from The Teacher's Wife and thought it would be the perfect way to present our holiday writing. I photocopied all the different templates onto coloured card and had it all organised for the first day to save rushing around (after seeing the time it took to do the photocopying, I'm very glad I did it in advance!) I love how bright they are, and think they look great strung up across our room.

Last year I discovered the 'Pout Pout Fish' series by Deborah Diesen and fell in love with the hopeful little protagonist. One of the books is called 'Pout Pout Fish Goes to School' which is a beautiful book about the first day of school, and the struggle to find the place where you belong. Unfortunately I don't have the book, so we watched the song version on YouTube by Gordon True, which, I'll embarrassingly admit, made me a bit teary the first time I watched it. 

As a response to the story my little wonders used water colours to paint a portrait of the brave little Pout Pout Fish. I love how each painting is completely individual, I have some very talented little artists in my class this year. 

Oops, I only took one photo :/ 

I'll take more this week and add them so you can see the extreme cuteness.

I got the idea for the next activity from Pinterest, but for the life of me cannot find the original pin...ugh! If you find it please let me know so I can link back to it.

We used a Venn diagram to explore the similarities and differences between ourselves and a new buddy we made in our class. The little wonders decorated each side of the Venn diagram to look like themselves and their buddy. I was loving how they turned out!

Hope you enjoyed reading, happy blogging :)

P.s. room tour is coming!

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

...in my classroom anyway! 

Oh how I wish we had a white Christmas in Australia.

We have been SUPER busy at school list term. With swimming, reports, school athletics carnival and testing, it has been full on! As of last week Christmas officially hit my classroom, and I absolutely love it! We've been doing Christmas writing, Christmas maths, Christmas art, Christmas cooking and Christmas reading. 

I've got heaps to show you, so I'm linking up with Kacey at Doodle Bugs for Five for Friday. Enjoy!

At the start of the week we received a super special delivery all the way from the North Pole! 20 eager faces watched as we unwrapped our parcel and found that it was our elf on the shelf! Needless to say my little wonders we all very excited! Inside the parcel we found our elf, a letter from Santa, a DVD and a candy cane for everyone. He spent the day watching us from his box, making sure everyone was working hard. This year he has been named Mr. Bauble (let's be thankful it wasn't Trevor or Simon as some of them suggested).

The next day we found him on top of our smart board, looking very cheeky indeed!

This has to be one of my ABSOLUTE favourite Christmas keepsakes I've made with any class, and will be one I do every year from now on. The little wonders coloured in and cut out five characters from the Christmas story (courtesy of Kari Bolt). They laminated them and put them onto a clear mobile that I purchased from Zart Art (an art supply company in Australia). I cannot say how happy I am with how they turned out.

I received a beautiful message from the mother of one of my kids, saying how special it was.

How flippin' cute are these guys!! 

These are our 'Snowmen Catching Snowflakes'. My little ones cut out all the parts of the snowman, including his arms, nose and scarf. They then stuck some gorgeous snowflake sequins above his head and drew on a perfect dotted mouth. We did catching snowflake self portraits last year with oil pastel, and I think this is a great version of it. 

There were a few different versions of this art work that I found on Pinterest, but my main inspiration came from We Heart Art.

Can you believe we ran out of snowflakes on the last one! One of my little wonders had to use silver stars instead, he didn't mind :)

One of our writing activities this week was to imagine Santa was stuck in our chimney. I played the song for them on YouTube and then we brainstormed ways we could get him out. 

I found a pin for this writing activity about 2 years ago. I found the brick pattern and Santa's boots on google images and made up the writing temple myself. 

Click here for the free template. 

I use to hate glitter! I would absolutely dread getting it out. Now I don't know what's changed but  I seem to be more and more game to get the glitter out. My little wonders used guided drawing to create these super cute reindeer. They painted them with brown paint and used stippling to create texture in their fur. After they dried they outlined them with black markers, added cheeks, eyes, a mouth and a nose, and put red or gold glitter on their nose depending on wether they had a red or brown nose. As you can see, red was a much more popular choice. 

Mind you we did realise afterward that we'd forgotten the ears! Oh well. 

I hope you've enjoyed my Christmas themed Five for Friday! 

Happy Blogging.