Ladies of Variety Christmas Party

The Ladies of Variety held their annual Christmas Party on the Wednesday the 7th of December. It's a huge event for approximately 1500 of South Australia's special children. Room 11 had been looking forward to this party all year!
An awesome time was had by all. Thank you Ladies of Variety!

Bunnings DIY

Today we visited our local Bunnings for a kids DIY project. Our project was pencil boxes. We had to glue pieces together and then nail them together. We all did a great job with a hammer and nobody bashed their fingers! After nailing everything together we painted and decorated our boxes. We all showed great perserverance and independence with the project.

 

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Calculator Numbers

Today in maths we looked at the differences between written numbers and the numbers on a calculator. We noticed that written numbers are made up of straight lines and curves and calculator numbers are made using only straight lines. We used pop sticks to recreate the numbers we saw on the calculators. We found that some numbers were easy to recognise and others were little harder. Below are some pictures of us working independently to recreate the numbers.

Week 8

Wow! It's week 8 already. Where has time gone? It's been a little while since the last post ( sorry I've been a little busy!). We have continued our work on the human body. We have learnt about our bones and our digestive system. We have just started learning about are circulatory system. Did you know that your heart is about the size of your fist? We didn't!
For the last couple of weeks we have been looking after the school's chooks. We have to check their water and feed, collect the food scraps from all the classes and collect the eggs. We all love doing this job. This week we got 4 new chickens! They won't lay eggs for a few months, but we are looking forward to having more eggs and being able to sell them for class pocket money. It will be a great opportunity to practice our money skills in a real life situation.
Check out the slideshow for photos of what we have been up to!

Week 4 Happenings!

Wow! I can't believe week 4 is over already. This term is moving along very quickly. For cooking this week we made pizzas! We had to knead the dough, roll the dough and place on all the toppings. We all did a great job and the proof was in how great they tasted. We have also been exploring our iPad's during our literacy and numeracy lessons. We love them!

Term 3 has begun!

Welcome to the first post for term 3. I can't believe that we are over the half way mark already! This term the whole school is starting the day with Play is the Way games. These games are helping us to build our social skills through positive play experiences. Room 11 has enjoyed starting the day with some fun. This term will be learning about the Human Body. We have written down lots of questions that we would like find out the answers too. We will also be studying an Information Report during our Accelerated Literacy lessons.
To build on our social skill learning we have started a new program called 'What's the buzz?'. The class enjoyed making videos last week on appropriate ways to greet people, holding a conversation and then saying goodbye. Tomorrows lesson will be on appropriate ways to gain attention.
We have also had a successful excursion to the cinema this term. The Ladies of Variety invited us once again to see 'Cars 2'. I think it's pretty safe to say that everyone enjoyed the movie and the day out.
Enjoy the slideshow below!

Week 3 on PhotoPeach

Holidays

I hope you are all enjoying your break. Last week I went to the SERU Special Education Expo. I've learnt some new things to bring back to the class. I've also been doing lots of learning about our new iPad's too. We will be able to use them very soon!
Also, just giving you the heads up that the Ladies of Variety Movie Day is Friday Week 1 (29th of July). The date crept up on me so permission slips will be sent home on Monday of week 1. See you all in a weeks time!

Swimming Fun!

Monday was our last swimming lesson for the term. We didn't really have a proper lesson, but we did have a lot of fun on the tarzan rope. Our iPad's also arrived on Monday. We are all looking forward to using them next term.

Author's Chair

Everyday we practise our writing. We use a sentence starter to help us plan our sentences. Today's sentence starter was "When I do my best I feel...". We are all encouraged to write independently and 'have a go'. After writing some students then share their writing with the class. It is important that we are able to read our writing even if our spelling isn't perfect. Here are two videos of students in the 'Author's Chair'.

Ladies of Variety Disco!

Room 11 was lucky enough to be invited to another 'Ladies of Variety' event. They had work for this one though. Behaviour in the class needed to improve to earn this day of fun and they did it! Crazy hair was a hit with the kids and so were the tattoos and face painting. Some of us hit the dancefloor early and danced up a storm! Some of us preferred to watch the dancers on stage. Some of us had never been to a disco before so it was a great learning experience. All in all it was a fun couple of hours.

Disco! on PhotoPeach

This week also saw Cassey celebrate her 11th birthday.

Happy Birthday Cassey!

Clay Animation

Room 11 have made their first clay animation. We came up with a story line and drew a story board. We designed our characters, chose our background and took a lot of photos. We really enjoyed making the animation and we are looking forward to making another one soon.

We hope you like it!

iPads!

Just a quick post to let that you know I have been lucky enough to receive some money through a SERU (Special Education Resource Unit) Technology Grant to purchase 4 iPads' for the class. Ipad's are an emgerging technology in the area of special education and we are very lucky to be getting 4 of them. I think the class will benefit emensely and I look forward to be being able to incorporate them into the learning program.

National Simultaneous Storytime

Today we participated in National Simultaneous Storytime. As a school we listened to the principal read "Feathers for Phoebe" by Rod Clement. We all loved the story. We enjoed the colours in the illustrations and we all thought the little grey bird looked a bit silly all dressed up! After we listened to the story we completed an activity which created a flip book of colouful birds created by us.

Catch Up!

We are 3 weeks in to term 2. I have been extremely busy the last few weeks and haven't been able to update the blog. Now that things have settled down I hope to post more often. This post will include a lot of photos from the end of last term and a few from this term. A lot of things have happened. We have looked closely at worms and started a worm farm, we went to an Easter Party organised by the Ladies of Variety, we have had another class birthday ( Happy 11th Birthday Jayden!) and we cooked stir fry vegetables with vegetables from our garden. We have also been learning some Play is the Way games. These games are non-competitive games that are helping us to work more as a team and to learn play skills. Next week we are organsing assembly. We will be a singing a song with some sign language that we have learnt.
Below is a slideshow of what we have been up to.

Holidays!

Term 1 is just about finished and we will be off on 2 weeks holidays. Enjoy your holidays and have a lovely and safe Easter. I'll catch you up on happenings of the last week at the end of the holidays.

Week 10- Swimming

We love our weekly swimming lessons. This week we learnt about water safety and how to save someone who is in trouble. We practised rescuing people, treading water and floating on our back. All important skills for staying safe around water.

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Week 9- Cooking

Week 9 saw us cooking again. We made baked potatoes, but we didn't bake them in the oven, we put them in the microwave instead. We grated lots of cheese and cooked some bacon pieces and baked beans to put in them. Going by the requests for seconds, I'm pretty sure they were enjoyed by all!

Special thanks to the budding photographers of Room 11 for all the photos!

Cooking! on PhotoPeach

Do you like baked potatoes?

What are your favourite toppings?

Week 8!

On Friday we had an incursion. This is when the excursion comes to you. We had a visit from a Toy Museum. We learnt about games and toys that children played many, many years ago. Some games were also from other countries. We loved it so much we couldn't stop talking about it all day. Below are some photos of the games we played.

Toy Museum on PhotoPeach

Week 7

This week our literacy block changed in structure. We now spend 2 hours, 4 days a week, on literacy learning. We start with morning group where we find out who's at school, look at our calendar, check the weather and develop our oral language skills. We then move into Writing. During this time we are encouraged to write independently and practise the skills we are learning. I also model a different aspect of writing. After writing we look at our Accelerated Literacy text. We are doing a persuasive text this term. Then we have Self-Selected reading. This is when we read independently or with a partner ( I also listen to students read during this time). Lastly it's Word Work. We are using the Jolly Phonics progam to learn about letter sounds. This new structure will take some time to get used to. Working solidly for 2 hours is a difficult task, but we are doing well.

A highlight this week was using the latops during maths to use the Mathletics website. We love practising our maths skills playing the games and quizzes.  Another highlight was cooking on Friday. We made pancakes. We did well with reading the recipe, measuring the quantities, flipping our pancakes, spreading our toppings and washing up afterwards.

Thanks must go to James who was the official photographer during our cooking session.

Week 7 Highlights! on PhotoPeach

Sports Day!

Last Thursday was sports day. We were hoping for perfect weather (not too hot and no rain), but unfortunately it was overcast and a little cool. We started the morning with a warm up organised by the captains of each team. We then started rotating through our events. We competed in 90m hurdles, discus, long jump, high jump, 800m run, shot put and 100m sprints. Each team received points for displaying the school values throughout the day. The focus of the day was on participation. Mrs P. reminded us at assembly that it didn't matter if we didn't win as long as we participated. If we don't participate we won't progress. We all showed great sportsmanship and cheered each other on. Check out the photos in the slideshow of room 11 participating in sports day.

Welcome To Room 11's New Blog!

We are 4 weeks into the new school term and we have been busy! The first 2 weeks was spent making sure we got off to a great start. There were lots of 'getting to know you' activities and discussions about how we could make our class run smoothly. We have chosen our SRC representatives. Congratulations to Tylah and James. They will be our reps for term 1. Our weekly swimming lessons have started. Everyone is enjoying the lessons and looks forward to Monday afternoons.
We will be studying minibeasts (insects, worms etc) in Science and Celebrations in Society and Environment.
Below is a slideshow of photos from the last few weeks. Stay tuned for more updates!!

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New Blog!

The new class blog for room 11 will begin next week! Looking forward to sharing our learning with everyone!