The Twits by Roald Dahl

During Term 1 and the beginning of this term we have been reading and learning about The Twits.  If you enjoyed the book, the whole thing can be listened to on You Tube as an ebook.  Just search for The Twits audio book within You Tube. 


 We have been doing lots of interesting activities and writing character descriptions for Mr and Mrs Twit. The descriptions included an opening sentence, a description of what the character looked like and their personality.  My aim was to help the children write more descriptive sentences and to join several ideas together with commas or joining words like and  or because.

Here are a few work samples.

Mr Twit   By Hannah L

Mr Twit is one of the main characters in The Twits.  He is cruel, disgusting, foul and smelly.  Mr Twit is mean and ugly because he has stuff in his beard.  He has hair in his nose.  Mr Twit is sixty. He is mean because he has bird pie every Friday. He is mean to little boys when he has no bird pie for dinner.

Mr Twit  By Luka

Mr Twit is one of the main characters in The Twits by Roald Dahl.  He is a rotten, disgusting, mouldy, slimy old man.  Mr Twit has spiky whiskers like thorns because he never shaves his beard.  He is very old, foul, smelly and ugly man.  Mr Twit is cruel because on Friday he has bird pie for dinner.  When there are no birds on the tree he gets really, really cranky.   He is very bad tempered when Mrs Twit does sneaky tricks on him.  

Mr Twit  By Callum

Mr Twit is one of the main characters in The Twits by Roald Dahl.  Mr Twit is a disgusting twit.  He never washes his beard or shaves it.  Mr Twit is mean and horrible.  Mr Twit is evil and cruel when he makes his monkeys go on their heads.  He is grumpy when Mrs Twit makes him mad.

Mr Twit   By Joshua

Mr Twit is one of the main characters by Roald Dahl.  He is foul, cruel and disgusting.  He has a bad temper when Mrs Twit plays tricks.  He is mean to the birds.

Mr Twit  By Zoe

Mr Twit is one of the main characters in The Twits by Roald Dahl.  He has a big hairy face with food in the beard.  Mr Twit is a disgusting and rotten old man.  He is so disgusting that he has hair coming out of his nostrils and ears.  Mr Twit is rotten.  Mr Twit is very bad tempered when he has a trick played on him.  He has a disgusting wife that he plays tricks on.

Mr Twit  By Melina

Mr Twit is one of the main characters in The Twits by Roald Dahl.  He is very hairy and he never brushes his hair.  He is disgusting and slimy.  He is horrible.  Mr Twit is the badest man in the world because he catches lots of birds for his pie.  Mr Twit is bad tempered because Mrs Twit puts a glass eye ball in his cup.

Mr Twit  By Joseph

Mr Twit is one of the main characters in The Twits by Roald Dahl.  He is a disgusting , foul, old man.  Mr Twit never washes his beard.  He is disgusting because he has mouldy cheese in his beard.  Mr Twit hates the Roly Poly Bird because it gave him the shrinks.  He is mean to Muggle Wump and his family.

The Twits is a junior novel or chapter book with very few illustrations.  The drawings in the book are black ink, fine line drawings.  The children drew coloured pictures of what they thought Mr Twit looks like.  Here are a few samples.

We enjoyed the author so much we have moved on to another of his books called James and the Giant Peach.  It gives us examples of even more fantastic characters and uses wonderfully descriptive language.  Our class in compiling a list of new words we are discovering through this novel study.

Fairy Bread Fun and Writing

We have been learning how to construct a procedural text.  This week we cut up and reordered a recipe for ANZAC biscuits.  We all had a go at making fairy bread today as part of our celebration for getting
10 000 hits on our class blog.  We jointly constructed the text on the whiteboard as we moved through the steps.

This is what we came up with.

Fairy Bread

Utensils


napkin, knife, plate

Ingredients


sprinkles, bread, butter

Method


1. Butter one side of the bread.
2.  Pour the sprinkles onto a plate.
3. Turn the buttered bread over and press it into the sprinkles.
4.  Turn the sprinkle side up and lay it on the plate.
5.  Cut the fairy bread into quarters and enjoy.

We are writing procedural texts (instructions) as well as learning the importance of following them.  Activity TV is a great website that teaches you interesting things like magic, cooking and drawing by following step by step instructions.  Today we followed the steps to draw a happy man.  Here are some of our work samples.

Week 2 - History

In History we began looking at some artefacts from the past.

  Niamh brought in an old atlas to show us.


We examined an old pencil case and ruler from Mrs Mowen which were about 40 years old. 

The children really enjoy touching and feeling the objects.  Many of the old things are a bit smelly, we thought.


Children told stories about brutal punishments from teachers in the olden days. 


We have been reading a big book about the history of school. 


 Two children interviewed Mrs Brown to find out about how she travelled to school.  She went to a very small country school.  Mrs Brown and her two friends rode their horses to school and put them in a paddock next to the school while they did their lessons.  


Mrs Graham lent us some ink well and pens from 100 years ago and we discussed how one student took the large pottery urn around and filled the ink well in the childrens' desks for them to dip their pens into to write.  We also saw a pen from about 50 years ago that drew up the ink from ink bottles for students to use.  The newer pen is a reproduction of the original.

 On AZNAC Day in the past, the school children went to their local war memorial to remember the fallen soldiers.

Classrooms had blackboards that the teacher wrote on in chalk instead of whiteboards or electronic boards like us.

Mrs Hammond's sisters came to St Ita's in 1960 and this is what their uniforms looked like.

Ella brought in an old watch and some very old photos.

We still have some treasures to discuss and examine.  Thank you to all the families and staff who have willingly lent us their artefacts.  

Great App for IPad or ITouch or IPhone

Our wonderful School Officer, Mrs Hutchins, has discovered a great App.  It allows you to play any Flash based game on your Apple mobile device.  Now you can access any of our blog links on IPhone, IPad or IPod.  This was the greatest disadvantage of these products and it is now solved.  The App is available at the App Store and best of all it's FREE! Thank you Mrs Hutchins.  You are a real gem!

I promised a party tomorrow for our 10 000 hits but it is going to be on Friday instead.  The shops were closed today and I couldn't buy us any treats.  Sorry one more day to wait.

Ms Taylor

[Glitterfy.com - *Glitter Words*]

Science


Today we began our science unit.  We discussed the fact that scientists do not always know the outcome of their experiment so they predict and infer what may happen.  Each child was given a small amount of water in a cup and several tiny water crystals.  They made observations and predicted what may happen when they were submerged in water.

This is a photo of the water crystals before they were wet.  You can see how tiny they are compared to the pencil.

I predict tomorrow the clear one might not grow.  By Claudia
When the grow they will be the size of a marble and when you squeeze them they
 break.  By Hannah L
Tomorrow I think our water crystals might absorb all the water.  By Geordan
When we put the crystal in the water it started to look hairy.  It might feel hairy if you picked it up.
 By Maya
I think tomorrow they will get bigger and bigger.  By Mikayla
My favourite ball is red.  By Theo
I think the red one might grow first because I put it in the water first.  By Luka
I think the orange or the red one will absorb the water first because they went in first.  By Abby
I think tomorrow when we come back they will be all fluffy.  By Hannah B
I think they will be a bit bigger and fatter tomorrow.  By Imogen
I think that when the absorb the water, and the water is bright, they might get brighter.  By Nicholas
I think the clear one will absorb the least amount of water because it went in last.  By Niamh
I predict that when they are fully grown they will feel like pom poms.  By Hannah S

After ten minutes of observing, some comments were;

After ten minutes they have got blurry and their colour is starting to come off.  By Conner
After ten minutes it looks like they are a DNA sample.  By Joseph
After ten minutes I can't see the white one.  By Zoe
When they start, they look like they are soft and fluffy but when they are fully grown they will be really soft. By Abby

After one hour the crystals look like this;

This is a tub full that will be very nice to feel when all the water is absorbed.

I wonder what will happen to them if we just leave them for a few days or even a week.

Homework


Your child's homework folder should have come home today.  Homework across the school will be different this term.  Mrs Thomas tells us the research has proven pages and pages of homework has little or no benefit for children.  However, spelling, reading and sight words are most useful.  Our reduced homework load allows children more time at home for family activities, playing and extra curricular activities.  Those families and children who are unhappy with the load are directed to Study Ladder tasks and our class blog links. They could also write sentences with their spelling words.


The children worked very hard today to give 8 samples of ways that their spelling words can be learnt. These can be found in their homework book.  It is an expectation that the whole list for each week is written out 4 different ways per week.  There are some more examples of interesting ways to write out the words in the tab up the top - Sight Words. Children are welcome to experiment with these if they choose.  If you read the tab up the top, named spelling, it will inform you of your child's spelling level.  They have performed a diagnostic spelling assessment twice this year so far to analyse their spelling errors and inform their needs.  There are five different levels in our class and each child will be working on their own level, doing word sorting and other activities during our literacy rotations.  


There are no more extra literacy or maths sheets attached to the homework grid. There will only be one homework grid given out this term.  The spelling sheet contains words for the whole term.  Please send the homework book back every fortnight, as per normal, so I can check they are writing out their words.


Spelling tests will be every Friday.  The test book will be sent home on Friday afternoon and needs to be returned on Monday morning ready for the next week. This is good guide for you to see how they are progressing.


Please come and see me if you do not understand the new procedure.
Here are two proud students' work.

Get Set Go Sport 


Sport lessons began last week.  The class are learning soccer skills.  They learnt how to dribble the ball, gain control of it, kick it with the side of their foot and stop it from moving.