Book Week

Congratulations to Samantha for being the winner of the D1 book cover competition in Book Week! We all had to choose our favourite Bible story and design a book cover for it...with a blurb on the back to tell everyone a little bit about it. Part of the challenge was to think of a clever name for the story.

Samantha with her prize

Samantha's book cover: Multiplied Miracle (the story of feeding the 5000)

 We also had 3 people who the judge said did a wonderful job too:

Jonathan's entry: The Floating Reserve (Noah's ark)

Samuel C's entry: David the Brave Attacker (David and Goliath)

Sam T's entry: The Tiny Soldier and the Giant (David and Goliath)

Greta work by everyone in D1 - your book covers are amazing!

The 100 Word Treehouse!

Today D1 is proud to present...our very own spelling 'TV' show, The 100 Word Treehouse! It is created by Samantha, Tayla, Matthew and Caleb. As part of their homework, they have to think about 1 'challenging' word and how it should be used. When they come to school on Friday, they share what they have learnt with the class...and we video it like a TV programme. They had to think of a title and theme song for their show too - what a great idea they had :-) Everyone in the class helps as you will see and hear!
Well done to our first 2 brave presenters, Samantha and Tayla and our announcer, Jonny! Here is their show:

How cool that it was Book Week and our presenters could be in their costumes!

Eggscellent Eggsperiments!

I think the title will give you a clue - we have continued our 'egg drop' fun! So what does happen when you drop an egg off the top of the senior playground? Have a look:

As you can see, some eggs bounce and survive the fall...but others don't!

Poor Humpty Dumpty...

So, back to the challenge! Each group had to design a way of dropping an egg without it breaking. Here are the designs and the results of our 'eggsperiments':

I like to call this one...Fluffy Surprise!
An egg surrounded by cotton wool with an outside layer of tinfoil to hold it all together.

Well done, Rosa and Madeleine - your egg survived!

This one could be called 'Beautiful Bubble'!
An egg wrapped in bubble wrap and tinfoil then decorated with little badges.

"Yes!" goes Samantha while Elina shows the smile of success.

This one looks like a 'Reverse Rocket Booster'.

When it landed, the egg had slipped to the end...lucky you designed a seat belt, boys!

Samuel and Jonathan with their clever contraption...and a whole egg!

This design needs to be called the 'Double Whammy' because it not only protected the egg inside the box...
it slowed down it's fall with a parachute too! 

Olivia, Tayla and Phoebe get the egg out of its feather bed - in one piece! Woo hoo!

What a lot of fun we had! What would YOU design to save your egg? Have a go...

Shooting Stars!

It has been a while since we had new work on our Shooting Stars wall. This is where we share good examples of things we are ALL trying to learn. Children's own work is often the best 'teacher' for other children learning the same skill!

We have 2 writing super stars here:

Samantha has shown us a great example of a 'complex' sentence.

Complex sentences are tricky to explain to 7 and 8 year olds! With Samantha's example, we could see a sentence with another idea 'tucked' inside it. Samantha is learning to use commas to make this extra little idea stand separately. Here is her sentence with the special part highlighted:

Once upon a time in Magic World Jenny Jackhound, the half jack rabbit and half hound, was using her magic reading powers!

You know you are doing it right if you can take out the highlighted part and the sentence still makes sense! Very tricky...

Jonathan showed us how changing the length of your sentences makes your writing more interesting to read.

If all our sentences are short, our story will sound 'choppy'. If all our sentences are long, it might just put us to sleep! We need a mixture of both types of sentences to make our story enjoyable to read. Here is part of Jonathan's story about hacradeens (apparently this is a new sea creature that has been discovered!) with the short sentences highlighted:

Hey! Have you ever heard about a hacradeen? Today I'm going to talk about them. When they are angry their eyes light up red. Red is my favourite colour. Hacradeens can play skeleton too. Get it? Sometimes they light up as a skeleton!

It's Art Time!

On Friday it was D1's second to last trip to the high school art room. Everyone was really focused on their work and enjoyed the new examples of letters and designs that Mrs Sneddon showed them. They were letters from old Bibles - very fancy and creative! Mrs Sneddon also showed the children some letters that were full of pictures that started with that letter - a special treat for children who finished their work early!
Here's a look around the room - so many hard workers in action!

This was our lesson plan for the day.

The boys sharing ideas...

Awesome colours!

Some people working on the 'special treat'...

Great concentration!

More 'special treat' work...

Colours, colours everywhere!

Working hard...

Our Second Art Lesson

Last Friday we went off to the high school art room again. D1 did a great job of remembering how to behave and what to do to be ready. I think Mrs Sneddon was pleased!

Our new learning goals...

...and another example of what we are aiming for!

Phoebe concentrating hard...

Samantha going from her practice page to the publishing card...

Sarah W doing a creative design...

Jonathan looks pleased with his progress!

Keep thinking about your letters and what you want them to look like, D1!

God is Number One!

D1 have done some great thinking this week about what our Devotions theme, 'God is Number One', means. Here are the ideas they gave me on the first day of school!

We collected all the ideas first then we put a tick if we thought it REALLY matched the idea "God is Number One'.
We put a question mark if we weren't sure.
Samantha's idea is in a bubble because we thought it was the best one - He is first...the King of kings!

Our next lesson had us thinking about people in the Bible who we thought put God first in their lives. We had lots of ideas and ran out of room to write them all down!

After we wrote the names, Mrs Sutherland asked the class "What did the people do that showed God was first in their lives?"
D1 children gave the answers that are written in green. These are their own words.
Pretty clever, aren't they!