We were absolutely thrilled to welcome some very special visitors from Dee Why Fire Station today! By coincidence, 1/2T were about fifteen minutes into our HSIE lesson, discussing all the ways firefighters keep our community safe when we saw a Fire Engine drive past our window and heard the blast of a siren!!!! Minutes later, the vehicle was parked in our playground!!! We have three firefighters in our school community, Huw Jones, Cam Dixon (Max's dad and Mrs Dixon's husband), and Brad Denoon (from our very own 1/2T, Keeley's dad and Brooke our Canteen Manager's husband!). We were so grateful to have Stage Three Brooke's dad Huw talk to us today. One student said to me, "This is the best day of my life!"
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I recently wrote to Dr Karl Kruszelnicki telling him how amazing Brookvale Public School is, how we are trying to raise the profile of Science and Technology and how much we value connecting with real-life-mentors who can teach and inspire us. Dr Karl's wonderful colleague Isabelle, has helped us set up a cyber meeting and our school will be Skyping with Dr Karl this Wednesday between our school library and his office at Sydney University! As if that wasn't exciting enough..... Last Thursday, during Writing a large box arrived. Inside were ten books by Dr Karl, donated by Dr Karl to our school!!! Each one is inscribed with an inspiring or funny hand-written message. They are on display in the Library and will be available to borrow soon. One of the reasons I was so excited by this gift was because we were, at the very moment the books arrived, talking about the power of words, the power of storytelling, how important it is to be able to connect with your audience.......
We can't wait until Wednesday :-)
1/2T watched a beautiful video about The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr Morris Lessmore
http://www.literacyshed.com/the-flying-books-shed.html. This is a film without words and I was so impressed by the students' attention, Visual Literacy skills, and ability to infer meaning. We had a wonderful discussion about what we watched and followed up with some writing. I love reading all the different interpretations. We are working on building phrases that capture the attention of our reader, words that paint a picture... Tanaz's writing sample was a separate writing task, but she shows us how important it is to grab the attention of your audience from the first sentence. Once upon a time there was a man called____ we don’t know! He didn’t talk, but he could make books talk. One day there was a big, strong storm and it blew the man and his house into a world without colour. He found a library. He read one book and it brought colour back into his life. He sold books to make money and to bring colour into people’s lives. He found a book that was dead and he tried very hard to fix it, he had to read it, that’s how books come back to life. He grew very, very old until he went home with the flying books and a new girl came to take his place. By Said Once, far away, by a winding river, there was a castle that was so old, that the King and Queen did not live there because they had died. One day, a man was visiting the area and when he saw the castle, he thought, “Someone could live in this castle”. So he went inside and he saw that the King and Queen had died, and he felt so sad for them because no one could use their beautiful castle and all their money. The man decided to fix this problem by taking the King and Queen’s treasure and giving it to the people who lived nearby. But then he realised he had no money and was poor and hungry! The people shared their food and money with the man and he was SO HAPPY! In fact they were ALL happy and lived happily ever after near the castle by the river. By Tanaz Once upon a time there was a boy, a quite ordinary boy, who was an author and adored books. All over his balcony lay piles and piles of books. Red, yellow, blue, all sorts of books. One day he was sitting on his favourite green velvet chair on his balcony writing a funny story about a clown. Just as he was about to finish his sentence a big hurricane interrupted his thoughts and everything went up! Up! Up! Including all the letters from his books! The boy was terrified! He tried to keep his balance and stay with his house but he was sucked into the hole in the sky. When he landed, he was in a place with no colour, not one single colour. But the worst thing was that when he looked in his books, all the words were gone, there were just empty pages. Then he saw a path all made out of book pages. So he decided to follow it. On the way he saw a beautiful lady. She was flying attached to some books as if the books were balloons. He tried to make his book fly but it couldn’t. The lady saw him and threw him a flying book. He realised that when you touch a book, it brings colour back into your life and he became colourful again. The books were bringing colour and now the world was looking brighter and more than just grey and black and dull. The boy followed the flying book and he came to the most magnificent library he had ever seen! On the wall was the picture of the girl he had seen. For days and days he lived there. The books were like children, he had to dress them with new covers and had to feed 802 books for breakfast, lunch and dinner. He even slept in a book bed and was a doctor for them. The boy gave some books away and everyone who read them had colour come back into their life. When he grew old the books magically made him young again and he went to a place to help other books. A new girl, without any colour took his place. Although she wasn’t without colour for long! By Freya The Giraffe's mascot was working particularly hard today in the Engine Room and encouraged Belle, Tess, Jaden and Molly to do the same :-)
This morning we heard a really loud drilling noise and we wondered if it was the Fairies??? Pretty much anytime anything happens in 1/2T we wonder if it's the Fairies! The next thing we knew, straight after recess, there were two holes in our wall, a pile of fairy dust and a lot of speculating about the fairies moving in or building tunnels between our classrooms! Some students were convinced that they heard knocking and even whispering coming from the walls. I had to snap a quick photo of everyone with their ears pinned to the walls....
WE have some amazing authors in 1/2T. In our Enrichment Writing Group on Thursday morning we were discussing narrative structure and the importance of thinking about an orientation for your audience through setting and character, a complication and a resolution. We focused on setting to begin with and used picture prompts to inspire us. When we describe things in 1/2T, we try to use all our senses to think about what we see, what we might hear, taste, smell and touch. Look what Elliot came up with........
A long time ago there was a lovely little cottage. Well, it used to be, but now it’s overgrown. A tree is sprouting out. Now there is no roof. Moss is climbing up the old walls. It is all a shade of light, bright green. Now it is abandoned. The windows are holes. And the house is now a million years old. By Elliot Often, we speak about creating longer sentences in our writing, but in this case, Elliot's short, sparse sentences create a powerful image. I am so excited to read the stories of all our students and see how they develop and progress this year. Today we were lucky enough to have Iris's dad, Song, speak to Stage One about his job as a bus driver at Brookvale Bus Depot. We learnt all about the qualifications you need to drive a bus, how to stay safe on the bus, and some of the reasons that our community needs bus drivers. Having guest speakers at school ALWAYS brings learning to life, especially if there is a personal connection with one of our students. If you would like to share your talents, passion or expertise, please let me know 😊 This afternoon we made 2016's first batch of cheese and spinach rolls. They were a hit! Even students who told me they HATE spinach and would NEVER eat spinach thought our rolls were delicious. We shared some with the teachers, who, incidentally, all walked into the staffroom asking, "What smells so good?", and with Brooke and her canteen helpers who also declared our spinach and cheese rolls a great success. It takes a few rounds in the kitchen for everyone to have a hands on role. Here you can see Molly and Sam combining our home-grown, hand-picked spinach with ricotta and herbs.
By coincidence, these students were also our award winners this week. Congratulations Sam for taking responsibility and showing leadership skills while mentoring the younger students in our class and to Molly for arriving at school every day with a positive attitude and determination to do her best. Have a great weekend everyone! In Enrichment today, students began to think about designing and planning a community. Miss Kovacs and I found it very interesting to observe that some students were very keen to 'build' and attempt to program their Bee-Bots to move around the built environment. For another group of students the priority involved beautifying every aesthetic and functional detail of the building (architects in the making?) and for others, it was all about the Bee-Bots. |
Rebecca ThomsonI come to teaching later in life with all the enthusiasm and passion it takes to complete a degree while parenting and working part time. I was lucky enough to complete my internship with Skye Surrest on Stage 3 in 2013 and am now loving my third year teaching a Stage One class at Brookvale Public School. Brookvale is a very special school. The staff are amazing, incredibly dedicated, kind and supportive... But most of all, I love the students! 1/2T are such a wonderful class and I adore teaching and learning with them every single day! Blogs I follow
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January 2017
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Welcome to 1/2T
These pages will give you a glimpse of the learning experiences in our classroom.
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