OLYMPIC STATS

For those of you who are into statistics, click on the Olympic medals to link to a website that not only gives you the medal count for each Summer Olympics for the last 108 years but also lists, under each country, the athletes who won medals and the sports in which they competed.

What interesting pieces of trivia can you share with us? Here are some questions to get you started?

What's the largest number of medals Australia has won? In what year?

Where were the olympics held 100 years ago?

Who won the women's beach volleyball at the

Sydney olympics? What year was that?
Explore the data and leave some trivia questions of your own for others to solve.

A ROOM WITH A VIEW

We are participating in this online technology project, organised by Jennifer Wagner, that runs from now until June next year. Each month we will be taking a picture of the view of our oval (and perhaps the bay view as well) so we can observe how the scenery changes with the seasons.
We will also write a description to accompany our picture, detailing the date, time, location, weather and what we see. Our pictures and descriptions will be uploaded to 'A Room With a View' , where they will be part of a gallery of images shared by participants from around the world.
We are really lucky to be collaborating with two other Year 1 classrooms in America- Mrs Barrett's class at St Francis Xavier School in Chicago and Mrs Bjarnar's class at State Road Elementary in Webster, New York. Both classrooms are in parts of the world where we are really going to see the seasons change as we look at the view from their classroom windows.
You will also be able to follow our monthly view (and hopefully theirs too)through pictures and descriptions that we will upload to our new wiki.
Mrs M is putting the finishing touches on it...so check back soon for it's grand launch!

WHO'S CORRECT?

2M,
Here's a 'show holiday' challenge for you.
I want you to have a look at this video. It's a scene from an old Abbott and Costello movie (Mum, Dad or grandparents will be able to tell you about them).
In this scene, Costello has baked 28 donuts. You'll see him and Abbott debating over how many donuts 7 crewmen are going to each get.

One of them hasn't worked it out correctly...can you?
Leave a comment to tell us how you worked out how many donuts each crewman gets.
If you have a microphone at home, you might want to use Sketchcast to show how you worked it out.

SCIENCE ON FILM

2M,
Look at these MYTHBUSTER videos. They should give you some ideas about how you will video and narrate your science experiment.

OLYMPIC MAGIC MOMENTS

What's been your 'magic' Olympic moment so far?

Was it Libby Trickett winning the 100m Fly?

Or our hockey players progressing to the next round?

Tell us about a moment you thought was special.

LET THE GAMES BEGIN

The Games of the 29th Olympiad have begun and what a wonderful Opening Ceremony it was.

Opening ceremony of Beijing Olympic games @ Yahoo! Video

What did you enjoy the most?
What left you in awe?
What made you think - 'I never expected to see that!'
What made you think - 'Of course... I know why they included that!'

Think about what we have learnt about China and Chinese culture eg we always expected fireworks because the Chinese invented gunpowder!
Can you think of another reason why fireworks played a big part?

Leave all your thoughts in a comment.
Enjoy your Olympic viewing.

AUTHOR UPDATE

Now Johanna is a published author.

Read her book 'The Pre-schoolers Guide to the Universe' at Big Universe.

OUR AUTHOR LIST GROWS

We're excited! Another two of the Gems are now published authors on Big Universe.
Olivia and Ben M were busy over the weekend working on their books and this morning Mrs M received an email that said they were both published!

Head on over to Big Universe to read Olivia's book 'BEST FRIENDS' and BenM's 'TOM'S SPACE DREAM'.
The other BIG news is that Patrick's book 'GOLF' is one of the 'featured' books on the main page. How special is that!!

Nǐ Hǎo

We've been learning how to speak some basic words in Mandarin Chinese.

Have a listen.

Get a Voki now!

If you'd like to learn some Chinese words or phrases, this is a good site to go to.

BIG UNIVERSE - A BIG HIT!

BIG UNIVERSE has certainly been very popular since Mrs M introduced us to it earlier this week.
Many of us have been so keen to use this application, that we have been working on simple short stories at home, so that we can learn how to use the program more quickly.

Whilst most of us are still in the drafting stage, today we celebrated with Patrick because...
he is our first PUBLISHED author on Big Universe!

'GOLF' is a picture book that inspires 'you' to tell the story and 'PATRICK'S BIRTHDAY' is a short story.
To read Patrick's books, just click on the book covers.

Keep watching for more links to our books as they are published - many of us have set ourselves the goal of finishing our books on the weekend!