Almost at the end of term...

Hello all,

Welcome to Week 9 - nine tenths of the way through! It is also planning week this week, so things are a little bit different in terms of when we have specialist classes, but we have four days of more or less uninterrupted work time which is great.

Doctor Deane was great fun last week - Jasper was lucky enough to be invited on stage and got to shoot an air-pressure-powered rocket at a simulated moon! The mousetrap experiment demonstrating the principles of nuclear fusion was similarly popular and we have had requests to repeat it in the classroom (or a la Doctor Deane on Hey Hey It's Saturday's recreation in the window at Myer as in the 1990s). We will see - maybe next week. In other sciencey/cosmic curriculum-based news, students are in the final stages of preparing their Eras PPT for presentation at the end of next week.

Notes, reminders and other necessary bits and pieces - notes due back include Year 4 Camp Notice (Year 4 only), UNSW competition (everyone), UMPC notices (Year 4 only), CRE expression of interest and money (only if you would like your child to do CRE - this note went home with the youngest child in the family). Tuesday is our planning day, so please ensure your child is here on time as they will be going straight into specialist classes. There will be no Year 3/4 Sport on Friday; we are not yet sure about Year 5/6 Sport. Our last homework for the term is due next Monday - so Week 9 will be our last homework week for the term. We do not assign homework over the holidays unless requested by individual students.

-Ang.

Four-Fifths/.8/80% of the way through Term 1...

Welcome to Week 8!

I'm looking forward to touching base with everyone this week at three-way conferences, and going over 45A's goals and achievements so far this year. Again, if you haven't been able to make a time due to other commitments, please let me know via the diary when will suit you to meet after school one afternoon.

We have Going Green With Doctor Deane coming to school this week! I am sure everyone is excited to take part - it promises to be a fun workshop with lots of opportunities for interaction and hands-on experimentation.

Other notes due back include cooking notices - we will be cooking in Week 9, and if your child has not returned the note they will not be able to participate - or enjoy the spoils of the activity either! We are still waiting on some UMPC notices to be returned; hopefully they will begin roll out early next term, so it would be good to have all our documentation back before the holidays to avoid any hold-ups.

Not much else to report, except to send out a massive thank you to those parents who were able to come to the athletics carnival last week and help, as well as cheer our class on to their many victories! Big congratulations to everyone for achieving such a high level of participation, and for the good sportsmanship you demonstrated towards others. We look forward to finding out who will go on to represent the school at the district athletics - last year we came home with the trophy for Highest Aggregate Score, which was a huge achievement.

See you all in the morning,
Ang

The Salmon Dissection

Today we used the touch screen to do a virtual dissection of a salmon to look at what similarities and differences there are between amoebas and other water-dwelling creatures. If you'd like to do the dissection again, you can find the game here. Share it with your family and see whether they can tell what the difference is between a fish's brain and an amoeba's nucleus, and the fins and the pseudopodia!

Please note: This does not work in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox or Safari (at least not on my laptop or iPad). It does work in Internet Explorer. If you cannot get it to load within your default browser, try IE.

Enjoy,
Ang.

Long Weekend

Hello everyone, hope the Labour Day Long Weekend has been a restful one!

We are launching straight into the week tomorrow with Library, Footsteps and Senior Lab taking our first two hours. Homework is also due tomorrow morning (I know lots of 46Awesomes remembered as I was informed gleefully by more than one on Friday afternoon that the weekend gave them one extra day to get it done!). Wednesday is the Athletics Carnival - remember to wear house colours, bring a full drink bottle and a sunsmart hat (both named) and to get lots of rest on Tuesday night ready to go on Wednesday morning. A big thank you to the parents who were contacted after volunteering to help - we will see you there, too!

Premiers' Reading Challenge will begin this week, so please watch for that note coming home over the next few days. Other notes that may be outstanding are 5/6 Camp Rumbug (this is now overdue) and UMPC notices (Year 4). There are also a few cooking permission slips also missing from my collection - please return as soon as possible as we cannot begin our cooking sessions until we have allergy/intolerance information from all students.

Three-Way Conferences will be held next week, on Tuesday and Thursday nights. The note detailing how to log on to the school's interview schedule was sent home at the end of last week. If you are unable to get to the school for an interview at the times listed as being available, please send a message via your child's diary as to when would be suitable on another day - I am some Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays after school. For those who haven't been in an interview in Cycle Three before, it consists mostly of going over your child's current goals, start-of-year assessment and discussing any areas of interest on all three sides of the conference. A reminder that as time slots are quite short, please do your utmost to be present at the classroom as close to your start time as possible.

What else... ah yes! My apologies for not updating the flickr stream more frequently. I will get to it this week. There are lots of interesting pieces of work to be shown, including our gummy bear fossil experiment and our subsequent (and impromptu) set up of an experiment involving different kinds of bread and the plant life they support (a.k.a., hypothesising why white bread molds so quickly?). Students also created models of amoebas last week (sorry if any burst in inopportune places!), and of the earth's layers the week before. We'll be exploring organisms slightly more complex than our single-cell models this week, and students will also be continuing their work on their Era PPT project in Senior Lab. The year five students are doing a great job mentoring the year fours through the functions in PowerPoint that they need to know how to use for future tasks.

Til next time,
Ang (Go Acacia!)