Our focus for the next few weeks is all about light.

Today we thought about what we already knew about light and dark, shadows, lenses, colour, rainbows and our eyes.

We knew some things but we have a lot of questions too

Here is a collection of our thoughts so far. We used the “Think Puzzle Explore” routine to organise our thinking this afternoon:

This year all of the classes in our school are being named after artists.

Our class is named after the brilliant architect/artist Antoni Gaudi.

We spent this morning looking at some of Gaudi’s amazing buildings, fantastic mosaics and creative motifs or plants and animals.

Next we all took smaller photographs and postcards and worked on the “See, Think, Wonder” routine in our groups. There was lots of interesting discussions and points of view about Gaudi’s work.

Lastly we came together as a whole group and thought about all of Gaudi’s work, and how he saw the world. We came up with some new vocabulary and ideas when we listened and responded to the thoughts of the other kids in the group.

Here are some of our “Circle of Viewpoints” thoughts about the NIPS XI and winning:

NIPS XI  by Ruth Starke is the title of the text we are reading in Reading Groups. It is a great story about about a boy called Lan who forms a cricket team to play at Multicultural Day at his school. It follows his adventures as he recruits the players, finds a coach, learns the rules and starts to play the game of cricket.

One of the themes we are exploring is the theme of “Winning”. We thought out loud about who were winners in this story:

Now we are using “Circle of Viewpoints” to help us think about how different characters in the story see winning. Its quite interesting to talk about how different people have a range of ideas on what winning is.

We loved how Mr Mitchell’s class in England used “Wallwisher” and so we are having a turn in our class today!

AllStars, please add your challenges or puzzles about Biodiversity on this “WallWisher”!

This afternoon we were thinking back over our “Biodiversity” topic and thinking about our learning. We tried out a new visible thinking routine for the first time -  “Connect, Extend, Challenge”.

We want to focus in on an aspect of  “Biodiversity” that is really interesting so that we can investigate it in a personal project. This thinking routine will

• help us link our new learning with our prior knowledge,
• help us work out how we have extended our ideas
• and help us articulate what we are still wondering about the topic.

These “wonderings” will point us in the direction of an area to study in our personal project!

Talking about our thinking can be pretty tricky – but this is what we came up with today:

(You can make the images larger, and easier to read,  by clicking on them!)

As we come to the end of our unit we are starting to think about and reflect on some of the things we have found out during our investigations.

We have put together this slide show of our thoughts so far …..

What do you think?