Catholic Education Week.

This week is Catholic Education Week and we will be celebrating with a whole school mass at The Loyola Campus on Friday.

The theme for this year is "Live Life in all its Fullness." This is a theme that we live up to very well at St Catherine's.

Last week we were visited by Michael Mangan who wrote and sings a lot of the hymns we practise from week to week at hymn practise.  We really enjoyed singing along to many of our favourites as well as his new song that he was commisiioned to write for this years Catholic Education Week.

The song is called "Come, Live Life!"  It's definately our new favourite.  Click on the link below to see the you tube clip and sing along!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxqtqlHZ_fo

Mealworms!

This term in science we are exploring a unit called "Watch it Grow."  We are looking at life cycles of different animals and how they diifer to the changes in humans over time.

As part of the unit, we are keeping mealworms in our classroom.  We will closely observe them and see how they will change through their life cycles.

Here is a cool you tube clip that explains how the mealworms will change and how to look after them:

Here are some pictures of our meal worms:

Here they are at the larvae stage.

Here is our meal worm habitat.

Asleep in the fridge.

At the moment we are keeping them in the fridge which slows their life cycles right down.  In a couple of weeks we place 2 of the habitats on the science table were we hope their lifecycles will speed up and we can observe them change into beetles!

Stay tuned.....

Our bird feeders.

We have placed some bird seed in our feeders and we are waiting patiently to spy some bird action!

Geography and Inquiry Based Leaning!

During Term 2, our class participated in a Geography unit titled "Our Town Proserpine!"  This unit was written by Mrs Hornstra as part of the TCEO Inquiry Based Learning Program, 2014 (otherwise known as IBL).  You can find out more about IBL in this blog post.

Our unit began with a Big Question that arose when we got an email from Mrs Hornstra's sister who wanted to visit Proserpine with her family, but was unsure of what she could do on a holiday here.  The Big Question was:

"Why should people visit Proserpine?"

To answer our question, we then made a list of sub questions and used a mind map to organise these questions and how we were going to answer them.

Mind Map made at bubbl.us.   

We then made a colourful grafitti wall with all the places that we knew to visit in Proserpine:

All the great places we know of in Proserpine!

Then we interviewed other people to find out their favourite places in Proserpine.  We also asked why these places were so special to them.  With the answers from our interview questions, we chose 6 of the most popular places to visit and we made a web site with the details of each place.

https://sites.google.com/a/prspne.catholic.edu.au/whyvisitproserpine/

One of our questions was how will people find all of these fantastic places to visit?  So we learnt some new mapping skills and then put our new skills into practise to make a very colourful map for visitors to use.

Learning new mapping skills with compasses.

Our map with our favourite places
 to visit in Proserpine!

We were finally happy that we had the answer to our Big Question so we decided we had to email Mrs Hornstra's sister to let her know why she and her family should visit Proserpine.  We decided to also use our new persuasive writing skills to convince her that it was the best place to visit!  Each student wrote an email to the family.  I would love to put all these on the blog because each one was so fantastically convincing, but there is just not enough space!  All I can say is that if you have friends or relatives thinking of coming to stay with you, get in touch with us here in 2H.  We can point you in the right direction with our web site, map and very convincing emails that we would be happy for you to browse through!

Selemat Pagi!

That means "Hello" in Indonesian!

This term 2H learnt about fruit in Indonesia including some exotic Indonesian fruits.  Here we are practising buying fruit at the "pasar" or market.  Let us know if you need an interpreter!

How can we look after our Meditation Garden?

During Term 2, we completed a unit in Religion called "Our World is Sacred".  Throughout this unit we asked ourselves how can we help to look after God's creation?  We came up with a lot of ideas throughout the term.  One of our ideas was to help look after and care for our meditation Garden which we are very lucky to have right next to our classroom.  Once upon a time there were a number of birds who called this garden home.  There was even a bower bird's nest in there!  We decided to try to attract the birds back to our garden by making bird feeders from icy pole sticks.

We enjoyed working together to build the bird feeders.  They are finished and waiting our return to school in Term 3 so we can hang them out in the garden and see what happens.  We'll let you know how we go...

From Roald Dahl to Enid Blyton!

During Term 2 we continued to read the works of Roald Dahl.  

Together we read:

Fantastic Mr Fox

The Magic Finger

George's Marvellous Medicine.

And Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator.

We chose this story together as most 

of the class had read Charlie and 

The Chocolate Factory in Year 1!

This Term we will sadly leave Roald Dahl behind,

 but we are very excited to move on to our next adventures!

Enid Blyton's Famous Five!

Starting from the first book in this very well known series, we will introduce all the characters and follow them through their adventures.  We will continue into Term 4 when we undertake a detailed author study.

Famous Five Here We Come!