LAPATHON BY LOCHLANN AND SHAWN

On Friday 12 of August the whole of Wattle Grove Primary School took part in the Lapathon.

For those of you that don’t know what a Lapathon is, it’s a day where the P&C organise for the kids to run around the oval as many times as they can. The younger students do smaller laps. At the end we get icy poles to cool down.

We also get a Lapathon recording sheet to tell us how many laps we did.

We also got a fundraiser book of prizes that you can win if you raised $10 or more.  There was a person who raised over $1000, isn’t that amazing?

The person with the most laps gets a lunchie as a reward.

It was so much fun!

RIO OLYMPICS

We have been learning about the Rio Olympics. Each day we have been looking at the medal tally and recording it. We’ve also been researching the history of the Olympics and some famous Olympians.

We found out that USA has such a big population compared to Australia. They almost have 300 million more people than we do. That’s why their athletes are so successful! They have so many more people to choose from.

We all loved learning about Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps because they are such talented athletes.

NAIDOC INCURSION BY KOULAH, ALONA AND OLIVER

On Thursday 4 August Room 19 went to the NAIDOC incursion to learn about Aboriginal culture with Miss Dagostino. Leonard taught us lots of important facts. Room 19 learnt something very interesting about echidnas and platypus. They are the only mammals in the world that lay eggs. We also learned about how they kill to eat animals evenly so they don’t wipe out a specific animal. Did you know that kangaroo bones are used for needles? Room 19 had a lot of fun when they connected wool to each animal that they held.

Boys, you’re lucky you’re in the 21^st century because if you hit a kangaroo with wood and it breaks this means you didn’t choose the correct hard wood. So you would get hit across the face with very hard wood. Last but not least Aboriginal women used to use digging sticks as their walking sticks. Thanks for reading.

Some other things we learnt during our NAIDOC Incursion:

• Aboriginal people make bags and clothes out of kangaroo skin
• When the owl visits Leonard’s family that means someone is dying
• Gum nuts have seeds in them and birds like parrots and cockatoos can get the seeds out with their special hooked beaks
• Aboriginal people never hunt the baby animals. They need time to grow and have babies.
• Aboriginal people use the boomerang to make the ducks think that an eagle is above them and this confuses the duck and makes it easy for them to be killed
• Aboriginal people use the tendons from the kangaroos as cotton/string to sew with
• You can use a big stick and put it in a snake hole to kill them
• All animals are killed for food
• Aboriginal people use fishing spears to catch fish – it has four hooks on it
• When it’s winter you wear the kangaroo skin with the fur facing your body
• When it’s summer you wear the kangaroo skin with the fur facing out
• If you find a snake track going into a building you have to make sure you find another one going out otherwise the snake is inside the building
• Everything in nature is connected – tangled with wool
• Leonard spoke about how important the trees are and how just by destroying one tree it affects things like; bees, birds, butterflies, possums, snakes, cockatoos, crickets, ants, lizards, bugs

SEMESTER 2 STUDENT COUNCILLORS

Early this term Room 19 voted for their new Student Councillors. There were a lot of worthy candidates who have been showing excellent leadership and organisational skills but there could only be two winners. Falencia and Kavi were chosen as Room 19’s new Student Councillors. They had their first meeting last week to which they took some very important agenda items that were discussed during one of our class meetings.

Congratulations Falencia and Kavi.

BIG WRITE

This term we have spent the first 5 weeks writing persuasive texts. Our first topic was, ‘School holidays should be longer.’ Our task was to convince the reader that our opinion was correct. Most of us think they should definitely be longer, including Miss Dagostino!

We’ve been trying very hard to make sure our persuasive texts have at least 5 paragraphs including a strong introduction and conclusion and detailed sentences.

The last 5 weeks of Term 3 will focus on narrative writing. This is where we get to use our imagination a lot more.

WHAT'S ON IN TERM 3?

We have a lot of exciting events in Term 3. We have already had the new Student Council elections, the School Photos, the NAIDOC Incursion and the Lapathon.

Still to come:

• Faction Athletics Carnival, Father’s Day Stall and Wattle Day in Week 7
• Literacy and Numeracy Week in Week 8
• Interschool Athletics Carnival and our Assembly in Week 9
• Learning Journeys in Week 10

We look forward to another busy term.