New Year in Australia

We will be looking at New Year as an Australian celebration first, before comparing it to New Year celebrations in other parts of the world.

We will be talking about what usually happens on New Year and one of those will be the fireworks!  In this video clip you can watch a little bit of the spectacular fireworks display on Sydney Harbour on 1 January 2020!  Listen carefully to hear another tradition – marking the end of the old year and the beginning of the new year!

What do you and your family do to celebrate New Year?  Discuss with a friend before we share ideas together.  Then you will be writing down ideas on your sheet.

What is Culture?

As we explore our neighbouring countries and World Celebrations, we need to understand exactly what the word CULTURE means?
These two video clips try to explain what culture really means.

1.  

2.

You will be working on your booklet and in it there is a page where you will be creating a page showing what your culture looks like. (You will be creating a poster to show your culture, either drawing your own, or you could make up a COLLAGE page to show this in pictures with the same headings, using PicCollage.) Example:

If you can understand what makes up a person’s CULTURE, you will find it much easier to find out the WHAT? WHEN? WHERE? WHY? and HOW? of world celebrations in many different countries of the world.  😎

 

The Weather…

We have looked at climate and the climatic zones of Australia.  Today we are going to learn more about the weather.

Watch this video clip and notice as many different kinds of weather that you can see.  Write them down on your sheet and we will share your ideas at the end of the video.
WEATHER 101 (National Geographic)

Now that we have discussed the different kinds of weather events we saw, here is a BTN clip to show you how meteorologists (weather scientists) predict the weather.  Listen carefully to hear what a METEOROLOGIST does!

BEHIND THE NEWS VIDEO CLIP (click on it to start)

BEHIND THE NEWS VIDEO CLIP (linking to Global Goals – Climate Action)

Now we will investigate a couple of reliable weather forecasting websites:
1.  WILLY WEATHER
2.  AUSTRALIAN BUREAU OF METEOROLOGY

You will be researching weather conditions with a partner for your chosen city in Australia. You need to learn how to find out:

  • expected temperature
  • expected weather conditions (sunny, rain, storms…)
  • expected rainfall
  • how to find the average temperatures or weather for this time of year in your place.

Explore these weather sites and have fun working out what weather other people are experiencing just because they are in a different place, with a different climate.  We will be comparing these later on.  😎

 

 

Australia’s Climates

We have done some work on Australia’s climatic zones but it looks like we need to go over just what the weather will be like in the different climate zones.  Remember the difference between WEATHER and CLIMATE!

Weather: temperature, rainfall, weather condition on the day or short term

Climate: is the weather (above) pattern over a longer time – this becomes the weather we expect in the different seasons.

In different climates, the seasons are really quite different as you learned in the video we watched the other day.  We learned about TEMPERATE, TROPICAL and POLAR CLIMATES.  In Australia we know them as TEMPERATE, TROPICAL AND ARID (DESERT) climates.

Can you remember which climate type we have  in Margaret River?

Let’s look at the coloured map in your booklet again to check just where these climate zones.  Remember their names.  What are they?

Mrs Veary 😎

LEGO CHALLENGE

Well done everybody!  You did a fantastic job on Friday working in your groups to build your Lego creatures.

The challenge was to:

Create a Lego version of an Australian animal in its environment.

Here are some of the ShowMe videos you made:

  1. Mitchell, Laiytn, Ari and Bella W.

2.   Maisey, Winter and Piper


3.  Raph, Tate and Jarrah created a slideshow of their Wombat in his environment. Click on this link to watch it.  WOMBIE the wombat  

 

Great job everybody. One more to come, I’ll add it tomorrow.  🙂

but here are photos of Zach, Azden and Eli with their Kookaburra.

Mrs Veary

Writing Prompt

This morning we are going back to writing a narrative!  Using the prompt picture below, think about how to include that scene in your story.

You will be brainstorming ideas together in groups, then you will need to plan what your pebble, rock and boulder will be.  You will need to write a sizzling start, and make sure you have a long, strong tension scene. (You can use your 5+1 senses brainstorms here!) and you will end it with an exciting ending and character wrap-up.  So – a FULL STORY plan.

WHO?  Who are these characters? What are they saying?  How old is the girl? What do you think she is looking at?  Does the dog belong to her?  Is anyone else in the plane?

WHERE?   Where are they going?  How did they get there?  Will they succeed? What might happen to complicate their trip?

WHAT?  What could happen next?  What kind of plane is it?

WHEN?  When is the story set?  If this is an old historical plane, have they gone through a time portal?

WHY?  Why are they both wearing those hats and glasses? Why are they there anyway? Why are there no windows?

HOW?  How did they get there?  How are they feeling?  How do you think the story ends?

SIZZLING START: Try to start with dialogue today: “………”


These are some ideas for your brainstorm.  We will start in small groups with a whiteboard and you will need to brainstorm about 10 reasons why they are in a small old-fashioned plane.  Then we’ll share them and you can choose one to write your story about.  BRAINSTORM – WHAT COULD THIS STORY BE ABOUT?

CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR S.O.L.E. TASK!

What a great job you did on your first S.O.L.E. research task!

Great teamwork and you really used each other’s strengths to help the group.  There were a few people who just needed a little help to get on track, then they found out heaps.  Good work!

I loved the way you showed me all the skills you’ve learnt about searching for information, finding keywords, and how to find and print images.

Just look at the fabulous results!  Your posters are magnificent!!! Good work sharing the job of presenting too.  Now that we’ve been to Erth’s Prehistoric World, we can certainly see how our mega-fauna fit into the timeline.

 

Our Kitchen Garden Bed

Our Kitchen Garden bed is growing really well.  You can see the carrots popping their little orange bits above the soil, while their green frilly tops dance in the wind.

You can see the goodness in the dark green of the broccolli leaves, growing bigger and brighter every day.

And, you can see the white butterfly flowers of the snowpeas fluttering in the breeze as they think about turning into pea pods, now that we’ve got the plants climbing up our new made up fence….

It’s all about food – growing our own organic, healthy food right here to eat very soon.

Hmmm….I wonder if these are all living things?  Check the other posts and songs and decide for yourself if they have all the characteristics of living things!  😎

Mrs Veary