In the Classrooms

Langley
The giant gum tree in the big yard is shedding its bark, much to the Langley children’s amazement! They keenly collected it off the ground and carefully placed it in the basket.
“It’s a big one!” commented Oliver L as he placed his bark in the basket.
“There’s bark!” cried Henry excitedly.
We decided to do some drawings on the bark with black marker. Here are some of our creative bark stories.
“Dinosaur, its dinosaur, look a frog, its eating dinosaur” said Dillon.
“A playground, there was a swippy swide (slippery slide)” Jack J told us.
Ryan’s story was about his Daddy, “dat my Daddy, he got long hair and he got no eyes!”
“It’s a picture of a caterpillar” said Tommi.
I wonder why the bark is falling off of the tree…stay tuned to find out what the children think.
Kind regards,Jess, Adele, Kerry and Jennifer

Mead
The Gingerbread man theme has continued in the Mead Room this week with more bakers baking in the kitchen, more role play and the production of a class book. We have finger puppets, hand puppets and a life size Gingerbread Man suit all being put to good use! We have also been learning a lot about books and the various parts of books. The children have learnt about authors and illustrators and have stepped into the shoes of these roles with much eagerness. Our investigation into books was further encouraged on Wednesday with a visit to our local Norwood Library for a story telling session.
Best wishes,
Emma, Emma and Susan

Cooper
As we continued to look at and wonder about the Eastern Rosellas that visit the ELC, we decided to create our own birds with clay and bright collage materials. Some of the children selected bright feathers, pop sticks and pipe cleaners from the Art Room and set them out at the clay table. The children looked at photos of the birds and thought about how they looked and how they could model them in three dimensions. We started by making body shapes with our hands. The children added pop sticks for legs and wings, tooth picks for beaks, buttons for eyes and picked up the birds and flew them around the table. Austin even rolled tiny worms in his hands and stuck them on his bird's beak. The children discussed how their birds should look as they worked...
"Making the eyes – that’s the eyes. Two wings. One [feather] on the back. All done!" said Rylan.
"Two wings. I’m making it like this. Look, I made a birdy… ta-da! Ooh, eyes. Here’s his little eyes. He needs a beak" thought Ajeet.

"I’m doing he’s beak first, I’m doing his face. Look how I can do faces. And his little toes now. I’m gonna chop this off ‘cause it’s too long. This is the boat, the bird sits on the boat. One has one leg, the other has one leg, a pirate cut it off. Up here is the flag and up here is the bird’s wings. This is going to be a magpie" Lucy told us.
The birds were beautiful, bright and feathery and you can see them displayed in our room.
Kind regards,
Ali and Susan

Chapple
What an enormous week we’ve had in Chapple! On Wednesday we joined with Edgerley Room to host the prep School Assembly in the brand new ANZAC Hall. We were wonderful and the big boys were very impressed with our story telling abilities! We shared with them the story of Goldilocks through puppets, singing, acting and telling. Lloyd even spoke in French, because you can tell stories in other languages too!
Jude Searles came to share a story about the farm with us on Friday. She was wonderful with loads of props to help us remember the story – she even had eggs from her farm! Thanks Jude! We had a wonderful time visiting the Norwood Library too – there were thousands of books there!
On Thursday afternoon we went on a number hunt around PAC, in search of… numbers! We found so many along the way and we talked about why they were there and how they help us to understand important things.
“They look kind of like letters, but they’re actually numbers,” Sebastian told us.
Olin explained to us about the numbers in the Drop Off area, “…to say how long you can park there when you’re dropping off your child.”
Meanwhile, harry was fascinated with the number plates on the cars and explained, “You’re not allowed to have the same numbers cause they’re special numbers.”
Lloyd said, “That measure how many gases in here. There is a 1 and a 0, 6, 3, 5, 8,” as he look at the big machine to measure gas.
Kind regards,
Kate and Eleanor

Edgerley
Wow! What a full week we had this week! We absolutely loved our trip to the Norwood Library where we found lots of different books from the ones we see at our Princes library. We talked about all the people who might borrow from the Library; someone suggested that even a policeman could borrow a book if he wanted to. You may like to follow up this trip with a visit to your local Library this weekend.
We also presented an assembly about the different types of storytelling with the Chapple children. We performed in front of all the students from Reception to Year Six! Everybody clapped when we were finished, we must have done a good job!
We continued to author our own books this week and particularly enjoyed creating roads in the building corner; they looked a little bit like 2D maps! I wonder where our roads will take us?
Kind regards
Mel and Rosalie