Our Excellent Wellington Forest Excursion

Last Tuesday, all of the Year threes went on an excursion to the Wellington Forest Discovery Center. We became bush investigators and had to look for forest clues to help our team solve our mystery tree.

We learnt heaps about the native southwest flora and fauna, and lots of interesting facts along the way!

 Did you know that you can tell the difference between a Jarrah and Marri tree by their bark? The Jarrah tree has much smoother bark, where as the Marri tree's bark looks more like jigsaw puzzle pieces. We also found out that Marri trees often 'bleed' sap, because there is a beetle that gets under the Marri's bark to lay its eggs. The tree 'bleeds' sap to try and get rid of the beetle!

Julz our forest guide also taught us about some of the animals that were native to the area. Some of them were;

The Pygmy Possum

The Red Capped Parrot

The Micro Bat

The Black Cockatoo

The Western Grey Kangaroo

 We also got to go on the 'Sense-ational Trail'. On this trail we had to wear a blind fold so that our sense of sight was taken away. We then had to hold onto a rope and go for a walk through the forest. We had to use our sense of touch, sound and smell to navigate through the forest and under, over and around obstacles! We was a very different experience for us all, but we really enjoyed it!

We hope you enjoy the video slideshow we made. Stay posted for our forest projects!

Tremendous T4

A Visit From The Department of Fisheries

On Friday, we had a special visit from Alicia from the Department of Fisheries. We had lots of fun learning about the rules of fishing. Did you know that the fish you catch have to be a certain size before you can keep them? This is so there are plenty of fish for future generations. We also found out all about some awesome creatures we can find at our local beaches. We loved getting our hands dirty and learning at the same time!

We all knew quite a bit about fishing to start with...

Claire had a go at measuring our Dhufish. It was only 40cm long so we had to throw it back! Dhufish have to be at least 50cm long to keep!

We found out that the stinky seaweed on our beaches is actually super important in the marine food chain because little bugs live in it.

Alicia asked us to sort all the sea grass and weed into one tub and all the 'creatures' into another. We found HEAPS of interesting specimens!

Hailey found a dried up seahorse skeleton.

Katie found a 'Sea Tulip'

Leo found a Port Jackson Sharks egg case. We thought it looked like a twisted screw. Alicia explained to us that the sharks screwed the egg case into rocks so their babies would be safe. The baby sharks stay in there for 12 months before they hatch!

We even tried to find the microscopic bugs that lived on the seaweed.

These are the classification sheets we used to try and identify our specimens.

After the incursion, we did some awesome writing about what we experienced and learned about. Here are Taj and Mikayla's wonderful recounts, head into T4 to check out the rest!

 

Happy Fishing!

Tremendous T4

LOTS OF BUDDY FUN

This term, we have started our buddy program with Mrs O's year five class. We had great fun last Wednesday working in small teams with the year 5s. As part of their leadership program, the year five students had to develop, deliver and run series of team building activities with us ..the tremendous year 2/3s!

We had an absolute ball and cannot wait to do it again this week! Here are some pics of our favourite activities!

Lachlan and Hamish playing a 'Get to know you' game with their year fives.

Isabelle and Zachary playing 'Indoor Newspaper Hockey'

Isabelle and Zachary playing 'Which Virtue in What Situation' game.

Hamish and Lachlan playing 'Outdoor Newspaper Hockey'

Isabelle and Zachary's group playing 'Eagles Nest'.

Maybe you might like to leave a comment about your favourite game to play with friends!

Over and Out!

Tremendous T4

Welcome Back to Term 3!

Well we have had a VERY busy start to Term 3, hence the reason there has been no blog posts yet.....eeeeeek!

So here we are to catch you up to speed! This term, we are learning all about endangered animals. 

Here is a link to our favourite endangered species website: WorldWildlife
There is also the Worldwildlife app that you can get for free through the app store! 

In reading we have been learning all about non-fiction text features. We found that non-fiction texts have many things that help us make meaning from what we read. Some of the text features we found are:

• Titles (these are usually in bold and hint about what is in the text)
• Sub-titles (these are also usually bold but smaller than a title and help organise the information on a certain topic)
• Photographs
• Labelled diagrams
• Fact boxes
• Graphs
• Charts
• Tables
• Maps
• Hyperlinks
• Flow diagrams

We also noticed that there is usually a nice balance between written and graphical information on non-fiction book and magazine pages.
 
We have been learning about the reading strategies of 'skimming' and 'scanning' for keywords and 'determining importance' in preparation to research an endangered animal of our choice. We learnt that a keyword is an important word that gives us information about a topic.
We used our little friends 'The Keyword Catchers' to help us find 5 famous keywords in an animal text. We then had to write our own paragraph using our 5 famous keywords!

We just can't wait to share our final animal reports with you all! Stay tuned!

Love Tremendous T4