HELLO MOOSE JAW!

Yesterday, we finally got to skype Mrs Cassidy and her Grade 1's in Moose Jaw, Canada.

Mrs Cassidy's class had a literacy night at their school, so they took the opportunity to talk with us - and we talked for ONE HOUR!

It was SOOO exciting to meet our blogging buddies and talk to them in 'real' time. It was 10 am Wednesday here but over in Moose Jaw it was 6 pm, Tuesday evening.

We started our skype call with a big HELLO and then we gave each other a tour of our classrooms. We noticed that there were tennisballs on the legs of the chairs in Mrs Cassidy's room. They told us they helped keep the room quieter. We thought they looked cool! Mrs Cassidy recorded this part of the call. You can view the video on Mrs Cassidy's blog.

Then we spent the rest of our chat asking each other questions. Some of the things we talked about were - what we learn at school, the sports we like, the games we play, what our school looks like, the foods we eat, our pets. We discovered that even though we are thousands of kilometres apart, we have a LOT in common.

Skyping with Moose Jaw on PhotoPeach

One of the questions we had for Mrs Cassidy's class was - why is your city called Moose Jaw? We wondered if it was because, long ago, there were lots of moose wandering around.

Mrs Cassidy told us the native Indians had a name for the area that meant 'a warm place by the river'. To the white settlers, this name sounded like Moose Jaw, so that became the name. Her class also showed us a picture of Mac the Moose, a REALLY big statue of a moose in their town.

Skyping with Mrs Cassidy and her class was lots of fun. We loved talking to them and know we are lucky to have such SPECIAL friends on the other side of the world.

(2M, what did you enjoy most about skyping Mrs Cassidy's class? Share with us in a comment. Mrs M)

OUR FIRST 'HOW TO' VIDEO

Last week, on Earth Day we created pictures in KidPix to show how we could care for the Earth. 

We wanted to be able to make a slideshow of our images to put on our blog.

In the past, when we have worked in KidPix, we have saved our pictures in KidPix.

To make a slideshow, we needed to know how to export our picture out of KidPix and save it as a jpeg.

Mrs M only showed one of us what to do. They then helped another, who helped another and before too long, many of us were not only 'export' experts but 'expert mentors' too.

Do you want to know how to export from KidPix?

Here is a video showing you how, made today by Georgia T, Connor and Jack D using the Flip camera.

We're really proud of our first video and can't wait to make more.

What do you think?

GETTING READY TO SKYPE

Tomorrow we are skyping Mrs Cassidy's Grade 1 class in Moose Jaw, Canada. 

We love skype. It's a great way to meet and chat to others when you can't talk to them face to face.

To get ready for out skype chat, each of us wrote two lists - a list of the questions we would like to ask Mrs Cassidy's class and a list of statements about us 

that we would like to share.

We found that we had LOTS of questions.

What question are YOU going to ask?

LINE SYMMETRY

This week we are investigating symmetry.

You can find symmetry all around you in

buildings and constructions,

nature and art.

Something has symmetry when you can fold it in half and both the sides match.

You can have vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines of symmetry.

Visit Links Learning to learn more about line symmetry, then test your knowledge in some games.
Have a look for evidence of symmetry around you. Grab your camera, take a photo and email it to 2mgems@gmail.com
Where have you seen symmetry today?

WE'RE BACK!

Words can not explain how excited we are to be back online.

For most of last term, we were unable to blog or do anything online due to very little or no connectivity in our room. 

It has been a very frustrating time for us and Mrs M and we missed being connected. There was so much learning that we wanted to share with you.

We are happy to say that the problems we were having with connecting have now been sorted and we can't wait to get into the swing of sharing our learning with you again.


Welcome Back Comments

So WELCOME BACK  - we can't wait to join in the conversation with you again!

SKYPING WITH FLORIDA

Today was such an exciting day.

As a class, we made our first Skype call.

We skyped Mrs Tolisano and some children from San Jose Episcopal Day School in Jacksonville, Florida, USA.

They are on a mission to travel 'around the world with 80 schools', connecting via skype and today it was our turn.

Here is a Google map to show all the schools that the children

from SJE are going to visit. The blue lines on the map show their journey so far.

Many of us had not skyped before, so we were a little nervous as we moved in front of the laptop to speak. We had to remember to use a clear voice and look at the camera, not up at the big screen.

First of all we introduced ourselves. As the children in Florida were from the school Tech Club and not a class, they were many different ages.

Next we asked each other questions to learn a little more about each other.

We discovered that we have a lot in common with the children in Florida.

* they wear a uniform like us

* they learn the same sorts of things at school

* they have beaches near them just like we do

* they play sports like soccer, football, basketball, volleyball, swimming - we

explained to them what netball was

* their weather is very similar to ours - the temperature was nearly 13C there,

which is close to the temperature we have in Winter. Our temperature today of

28C, is similar to what they have in their Summer.

Some things that are different

* we are in different time zones -it was 11:50am Monday here, but it was 8:50pm Sunday in Florida

* they are in Winter when we are in Summer

We think it's amazing that we can talk to others around the world.
It's a great way to learn about each other.
We can't wait to skype again!

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY

Tomorrow is Valentines Day.

Every day and especially on Valentine's Day, we remember those who love us and the people that we love.

So to all the special people in our lives - our family and friends - who love and care for us
here's our special Valentine's Day voki for you.


Get a Voki now!

DAY 10 - A 'ZERO THE HERO' DAY!

Today we had a special visitor
come to our
classroom - ZERO THE HERO!

WHY?





Because it was DAY...

We are counting up to the 100th day of school, so ZERO THE HERO came to help us understand place value and the important role 'zero' has in a number. He's going to help us count in tens, visiting us every '10' days until we reach the '100th' day and then we'll have a big celebration.

This was ZERO'S first visit so we watched his favourite video to learn a little more about why the number ZERO is a HERO.

Here it is for you to watch too.

When ZERO visits, we have special activities to do to help us count in tens.

Watch the slideshow to see what we did today.

We are really excited about ZERO visiting us again in another 10 days. Now there are only 90 days until DAY 100.

If you've counted up to DAY 100, we'd like to know what activities you did along the way. Did ZERO THE HERO visit you too?

PEACE IS...

This week, we have taken part in a collaborative project organised by Chris Harbeck in Canada called THE PEACEQUILT PROJECT. With the focus on REMEMBRANCE DAY this week, Mr Harbeck thought it would be a good idea to ask children to share their understandings about peace, war and Remembrance Day through pictures.
The mosaic above reflects our thinking about PEACE - what it looks like, sounds like and feels like.
Classes from Canada, Australia and the US took part in the project. Some drew pictures for Peace, some Remembrance, some Veterans and others war. You can view all the 'quilts' here -then choose links on the sidebar.
Make sure you click on the links beside our mosaic. They will take you to Flickr where you can view each of our pictures and read about what PEACE means to us.

TRAFFIC JAM

We have been having a lot of trouble getting on to blog lately.
We can wait ages for pages to open or pictures to upload - sometimes all day.
We come in each morning, hoping things will be faster, but usually we are disappointed.


Mrs M has tried to explain that what's happening to us is like a traffic jam on the freeway.
Now that nearly all classes in the school are blogging, there's a lot of people on the network. We're like the cars.
Our bandwidth is like the freeway. It carries information into and out of our network. The problem is, with so many of us on, it's not big enough to carry all the traffic, so it slows right down.


Even though it's been really hard to stay connected and share our learning from school, we've been doing lots from home.
Have you checked out our blogfolios lately? You'll find lots of posts about what we've been doing. Just head over to the sidebar...and please leave some comments!

We've also discovered Google Docs and we just LOVE working with them.
We love them because you can have many people working on the same document at the same time, no matter where they are and of course, we can add to them from home. It's great fun watching people make changes while you're working on it.
Here are some of the ways we've been using Google Docs:

• Investigating Kilograms
• Investigating Litres
• Working With Verbs

and these are docs started by Paddy, Patrick, Jacob and Johanna:

• Adding 'ing' -Paddy
• 'ook' Words -Johanna
• 'uit', 'ute', 'oot' Words - Patrick & Jacob
  
  Have you used Google Docs? Can you think of other ways we can use them to collaborate?We'd love to know your ideas.