ANZAC Day

During the last part of the term we have been continuing our work on different celebrations and we have turned our attention to the commemoration of ANZAC Day. In our Writing lessons we have started writing a class persuasive text on why we should still commemorate ANZAC Day. Based on their research on this special day, this is the introductory paragraph that the class wrote.

“We should commemorate ANZAC Day. ANZAC Day is definitely a day that should be remembered. The sacrifices that Australian and New Zealand soldiers made were important. Also, learning about wars teaches us never to have them again. Finally, there are still soldiers serving our country who deserve our respect. All Australian and New Zealand people should find a way to commemorate ANZAC Day.”

We will post the rest on the blog when we finish it at the beginning of next term.

We also furthered our learning about ANZAC Day by watching the rather sad episode of My Place (our class novel for this term) which centered around a child’s life in the aftermath of WWI. A big highlight of this viewing on the last day of term was also having some ANZAC biscuits to nibble on while we watched.

Potatoes for St Patrick’s Day

Part of the year 3/4 curriculum is learning about different celebrations that are celebrated in different cultures around the world. M10 and M11 took our learning to a very yummy level today, not only learning about the reasons behind the celebration of St Patrick’s Day but also having a delicious shared lunch of baked potatoes.

Some of the facts we learned are:

St. Patrick’s Day is the national holiday of Ireland and is usually celebrated on March 17.
Lots of people, whether they are Irish or not, wear green on this day.
The shamrock, pot-of-gold and leprechans are also associated with St. Patrick’s Day. The shamrock was worn as a badge on the lapel. Three is Ireland’s magic number and the three petals that make up the shamrock are supposed to bring good luck.
The leprechaun is a small Irish fairy and if someone catches a leprechaun, he will be forced to tell where he hides all his pots of gold.

Here we are enjoying our yummy potatoes for St Patrick’s Day

Our Year in Review

To finish off our work on writing recounts for the year, the children have written reviews of what they liked about this year and what their wishes are for next year. They are a very honest account of their likes and dislikes and we hope you enjoy reading them and chatting more with your child about theirs. Continue reading →

Remembrance Day 2015

On the 11th of November at 11:00am, Modbury West School stopped to commemorate Remembrance Day. Previously in the week, we had created poppies and learnt about the significance of these as part of the commemoration. Prior to the assembly we laid our poppies in the garden with the poppies created by all the other students in the school. It was a very special time and allowed the students to think about the sacrifices that have been made.

We also read Laurence Binyon’s poem, “For The Fallen” and discussed the lines which we would hear read at the commemoration ceremony

“They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.”

We thought we would share with you some of the images from our poppy laying this morning.

My Favourite Time of Year

Today we shared with the children the song we will be performing at the End of Year Concert. With Mrs Morris’ class, we will be performing is a song called My Favourite Time of The Year by an English band called Florin Street.

We thought that this song was most appropriate given that both classes have been learning about the era in history in which the film clip is set. It also has beautiful lyrics about the positive feelings we all have around this time of the year

We have embedded the YouTube clip here for the children to view and start learning the words. They will also be given lyric sheets to help with this too.

We hope you all enjoy it as we are really looking forward to performing it!

The First Fleet

Over the last couple of weeks we have been looking at the role of the First Fleet in Australia’s history.

We are now starting an inquiry topic looking at the stories of the convicts and ships from this era of history.

Mrs Knipe has collected here some websites which should be useful in our research

http://www.fellowshipfirstfleeters.org.au/ships.html

http://kidcyber.com.au/topics/australia/first-fleet-timeline/

http://firstfleet.uow.edu.au/search.aspx

http://www.australianhistorymysteries.info/resource-zone/primary-first-fleet/

MEGAFAUNA!

In history we have been learning about animals called Megafauna (mega-big) (fauna-animal)

They were alive around 45,000 years ago.

Some people said that the Aboriginal people killed them all.

Others say that there was a catastrophe, or climate change.

We have been saying to our mums and dads that they are real but they say we are CRAZY!!!!!!!

One of our classmates went to the museum and found proof that we are not crazy. There was a display of megafauna and he brought back some photos to share with us.

Here are the photos and some of us are going to go to the museum in the holidays to check out the display for ourselves!

Our Places!

This term we have been reading the wonderful book My Place by Nadia Wheatley. This story has taken us back in time from a modern day outer suburb of Sydney back to what this same piece of land looked like in Pre-European times. We have learnt so much about Australia’s history through each page, reading about the life of each child who has made this place their own for each particular era of time.

As we finished the book, we started to create our own versions of My Place, writing, as each page in the story did, about our families, everyday life, our pets and special celebrations.

We are publishing our originals as a book in the classroom but we thought we would share them with you here in the Knowledge Zone too!

Postcards from the front!

As part of our learning about World War 1, we were lucky enough to have a teacher friend of mine, Mrs Johns, visit us today to share some very special postcards.

Mrs Johns had relatives, 2 brothers, who were orchardists in the Adelaide Hills, before they enlisted in World War 1. Mrs Johns spent some time with us today sharing some very precious postcards that these brothers sent back to their sister from the various locations in which they trained and served during the war. We heard their words, written 100 years ago, about what they were seeing and learnt how the soldiers didn’t want to write about the details of the war but rather hear about the everyday details of life back at home. It was a fascinating look into what these brothers shared about their experiences, as well as an opportunity to see the images on the postcards which told their own story too.

Mrs Johns also shared with us information about her own father, a pilot in World War 2, and we saw important artefacts such as his “dog-tags” and badges and medals from his time of service.

Many thanks to Mrs Johns for coming in and sharing these precious things with us.

World War 1 Memory Box

With 2015 being the centenary of the landing of Australian Troops at Gallipoli, we are going to spend some time leading up to ANZAC Day learning about the importance of this event in Australia’s history. The first special learning opportunity we were lucky enough to take part in was investigating a “Memory Box” that Mrs Pascoe organised to visit from the Australian War Memorial.

It was full of real and replica uniforms, equipment and artefacts and we had a wonderful time donning the white cotton gloves and imagining what it might have been like for the men and women who had used and worn these items as part of their everyday life during wartime.

Take the time to look over the photos of our experience that day and if you would like to read more about what we investigated you can check it out here.