New Vocabulary

In our classroom 'Spinkini Land' named after our teachers, also known as Premiers, Ms Zinghini and Ms Spink, we all have important jobs. One of these jobs is a 'Vocabulary Specialist' , their role is to collect new and interesting words that our class do not know and share them each week.

The challenge is to see how we can use these words effectively in our writing or in our everyday conversations.

Click on the following link to see what we come up with. Enjoy our new words, we hope you learn something.

http://56bvocab.postach.io/

WWII by Aykut

Tigers by Makeelly

Rhinos by Jacob

Term 4- Creating Our New Learning Spaces

Today we welcomed the beginning of Term 4 with rearranging our classroom. We had to work as a team and solve problems as they came up. In 5/6 B we have no assigned seats and we are encouraged to sit wherever we will work best. After rearranging our classroom and learning space, we settled right in.

Wolf Haven International Skype

Today 5/6A and 5/6B Skyped with Wolf Haven International, we found them through Skype in the Classroom. Wolf Haven International (WHI) is an organisation in North America that works for wolf conservation to protect wolves and their habitats.

WHI is in Tenino, Washington, USA.

View Wolf Haven International in a larger map

This term our Big Idea for Challenge Based Learning is Survival. The essential question we are trying to answer is 'What Impacts upon Survival?'

Our guiding questions are-

• What is survival?
• What affects our chance of survival?
• How can we help endangered animals survive?
• What is happening to cause habitat loss?
• Why do people struggle to survive in other countries?
• What affects the survival of our natural environment? 

We participated in the Skype in order for us to find information to help us answer some of our guiding questions. We started at 9am Melbourne time, which was 4pm Tenino time, yesterday! We met Erik, who works at WHI and knows so much about wolves!

Some interesting facts we learnt were:

• A dingo is a sub-species of a wolf
• Wolves are a part of the dog family, also known as canid family
• The best way for wolves to survive is to stay in areas where their are no humans
• The prey on weaker animals in herds when they are hunting
• Only two human deaths have occurred as a result of wolves
• Wolves are hunters but they also scavenge food
• Wolves teeth are designed to tear meat a a part
• Wolves are an apex predator which means they are at the top of the food chain
• Wolves live in packs that hunt other animals

Some new and interesting vocabulary we discovered-

  

We will be presenting our work completed about this Skype soon...stay tuned! 

What do you know about wolves? 

What other endangered animals do you know about? 

Writing Poetry with Janelle Lee

Today we had a fantastic opportunity to work with a real author. We did this by using Skype to invite Janelle Lee into our classroom. Some of us remember Janelle from when she Skyped with Miss Spink's class last year.

Lately in writing, we have been investigating poetry. We have read a wide variety of poems and identified different devices poets use. When writing poetry we have experimented with onomatopoeia, alliteration, simile, metaphor and personification. We have had a go at using repeating refrains to add rhythm. We do that by counting the syllables in each line.

Today with Janelle we were challenged to write a poem about a 'journey'- this could have been any journey we have been on, physical, social or emotional. The structure of our poem had to have three stanzas, the first two were quatrains and the last a couplet.

During the Skype we 'live tweeted'- this was a great way to share what we were doing and how we were feeling.

Stay tuned for our poems when they are finished, we look forward to sharing.