2H 2009

Our swimming program has started! Every day for the next 2 weeks we hop on the bus and travel to Aquarena. We love going to our swimming lessons, although we are feeling quite tired from all the extra physical activity!

 A HUGE thank you to all the mums and dads who have travelled to the pool to help and watch us swim. The kids and teachers appreciate your support so much!

As part of our dinosaur topic each member of our class has chosen a particular dinosaur to adopt for the term. We have been researching our dinosaur and have learnt so much about its diet, habitat, appearance as well as many other interesting  facts and features. We love sharing our research with the rest of the class!

We have been thinking about what makes our adopted dinosaur so special and why it would be good to really have one. This is called Higher-order thinking as it requires us to manipulate information and ideas to solve problems and discover new understandings. Click on the names below to see our work.

Ashlea                                    Nathan

Oliver                                      Ben

Tiahn                                       Leo

Can you think of any other reasons it would be good to have your own dinosaur?

On Wednesday 4th November Grade 2 went on an excursion to the Melbourne Museum. We learnt lots of new stuff about dinosaurs and had the opportunity to ask questions, explore fossils and do some archeological digging for ourselves.

“I liked the brachiosaurus skeleton and the dinosaur puppets” - Jeremy

“I liked going because my mum came and I liked seeing all the fossils. My favourite thing was the Children’s Gallery” – Jemma

“I liked doing the Dinosaur Dig. I thought the Museum was the best place to be!” - Harrison

“It was really fun because we got to do lots of things and my favourite thing was playing dinosaur puppets with Charlotte and Josh. Charlotte and I found a dinosaur skeleton in the Dinosaur Dig.” – Siobhan

“I thought the Museum was great! When I looked at ,myself in the giant mirrors I felt really weird. The dinosaur skeletons were really cool. When I got home I drew the big flying pterodactyl. It was the biggest.” - Josh

 It was great fun - see us at the museum and leave a comment.

Today we had great fun celebrating ITALIAN DAY! At Anderson’s Creek Primary School all students from prep to grade 6 learn Italian with Signora Gigliotti. Once a year we celebrate this wonderful culture by dressing up, doing a range of activities and, most importantly, EATING GELATO - YUM!

Check out Signora’s blog – you can find the link on our blog roll down the right hand side of this page.

This week in maths we have been learning all about place value. It’s been hard but a lot of fun! We used a trading game to help us see the value of different numbers and understand the real worth of numbers in the tens, hundreds and thousands columns.

The Trading Game Instructions:

To play the game you need 

*MABs 

* A place value chart for each team

* Dice

1. Get into groups of 4

2. Each group has a Gofer, a Roller, a Trader and a Checker.

3. Set the timer for a specified time (we use 5 mins)

4. The roller rolls the dice. The gofer goes and collects that number of ones from the MAB box, the trader makes any trades that can be made (eg. 10 ones can be traded for 1 ten) and the checker checks that all groups are playing fairly and making correct trades.

5. Once the gofer has returned, the roller may roll again.

6. The game continues until the timer stops. The team with the highest number wins.

What do you think of The Trading Game? Check out the photos of us playing it and leave us a comment.

Today some the students and teachers at Anderson’s Creek Primary School walked to school as part of ‘Walktober’. Walktober is all about getting out of our cars and using our legs to walk to school. This is good for us and good for the environment! We met at the Warrandyte Bakery at 8am and walked all the way to school – it was a great way to get to school and a fun way to start the day!

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Check out the photos of our dinosaur egg hatching. It took about a week to hatch completely – we loved seeing the egg change everyday!

The first crack appears

Our first glimpse of 'Allo' the Allosaurus

Meet our new dinosaur - Allo the Allosaurus!

We decided to name our Allosaurus ‘Allo’. We had so many great name suggestions that we had to take a class vote!

This week we are busy doing some research about allosauruses. Today we worked in small groups to find lots of information about their diet, habitat, appearance and other special features. See us hard at work in the slideshow below:

A large dinosaur egg has arrived in our classroom! It is about the size of a bowling ball.

What type of dinosaur do you think might have laid the egg?

I hope it’s a Triceratops because they are my favourite type of dinosaur.

I wonder if it will hatch when we get back to school next week – I guess we’ll all have to wait and see!

I hope you are all enjoying a wonderful holiday! What have you been doing? I went to the Teacher Games in Bairnesdale. It’s like the Olympic Games but it is just for teachers in Victoria. I went with Miss Gamble, Miss Eakin, Miss Schiller, Mrs Thornton, Mr Bain, Miss McLiesh, Miss Mason and Jo. We didn’t win any medals but we had a great time!