Tag Archives: School

Toonalook camp

On the 15th of October (Tuesday) we packed our bags, came to Bulleen and started the long 4 hour bus ride to Toonalook. (Toonalook is around the Gippsland lakes.) On the trip we watched Mr. Bean which is a very funny comedy. He is an innocent character who always makes viewers laugh and hates the blue car. You’ll know what that means if you’ve watched it. Half way through the trip we stopped at Yarragong for a morning tea break. Because it was near a busy road we would always wave to the cars and trucks hoping for them to honk their car horn back. It was kind of funny. Then we got back on the bus and kept going. 

When we got to Toonalook we were greeted by Josh who was basically running everything in the camp. There was also Jesse who was my group leader and Grace who was team 2’s group leader. We also had two year 11’s with us (em(Emily) and Charlie(Charlotte)) who helped out in the groups and make different activities for us. We nervously sat at the bench we would meet up at as the staff read out our tent groups I was lucky enough to be with my friends.

Some of the things that we did included:

•went on Toona storm

•went kayaking

•expo camping

•played empires

•played king ball

•played the shoe game

•played bang

•played Gaga ball

•went on a water police boat 

•went bike riding

•went fishing

•went koala hunting

•Toona challenge

•found koalas 

•found kangaroos 

•went on a hike (kind of)

•ate! #wewanttrish

Toona storm is a boat that we went on. The weather was perfect for it because we could go really fast and still the boat jumped up and down. The other boat that we went on was a water police boat. This was probably the coolest boat I’ve ever seen! They had beds, kitchens, bathrooms and more. We got to ask them questions, explore their boat and have a good time. We also went on a 7 or 12km bike ride but I’m not sure which one. It was really fun because in that time we got to see koalas and kangaroos. We went koala hunting and by the end of that we were experts at finding them because we had the technique. Firstly find a tree, then look down and find lots of koala poo, and lastly look up and see a big fat cute ball of fluff! We saw all of these things on Raymond island. On the bike ride we went on roots, sand and roads. It was so fun.

The games that we played included; Gaga ball, king ball, the shoe game

Toonalook had so many things to do. Two really fun thing that we played were king ball and the shoe game. King ball is basically 4 square except much bigger. We played on four water tanks with a volley ball type ball. The ball could only bounce twice in your square otherwise you went out. The objective was to get people out so that you could make your way to king for as long as possible. In best level order there was king, queen, jack, dunce and yes there was a very long line on the bench! Most people spent their free time playing this. The other game ‘the shoe game’ was a two team game that was very exciting. Two teams were facing each other on chair with a space in between. In between at the middle there was a water bottle and two shoes. On the sides there are cushions. When the referee calls a number that you were assigned before the game started you run and get a shoe then sit on a cushion and try to throw the shoe and hit the bottle to get a point for your team. The rules were very strict but there are way too many for me to say now. But everyone was almost screaming because they were encouraging their team so much. Empires was such a good game. We played for a while at night while at expo. How the game works is; each person tells the people who are running the game a person who isn’t them then someone starts and guesses who someone is. If they get it wrong then the person who was guessed gets a turn. If it was correct the player who was guessed goes to the other persons team. Then it keeps going until there is one empire and the leader of that empire wins.

Before we played empires we went on a hike to the camp site and on the way we got to try to skim some rocks on the sea. Then we came to the camp site and pitched our tents. It wasn’t too hard to put our tents up but it was one of my first times putting up a tent. Then we unpacked for the night and had some dinner. That night we ate burgers which were really good. Unfortunately Trish our amazing chef wasn’t there but Jesse still did an incredible job. I was a little bit nervous when we had to go to sleep because one of the teachers at our school had to go to the toilet at Toonalook one night and then a kangaroo started chasing them so I didn’t want that to happen to me. I had an okay sleep but I had to use quite a bit of resilience in the morning because it had rained and somehow my stuff had got wet when it was in the tent. I had to use resilience, connectedness and courage in this time. Connectedness to build our tent together, resilience to even sleep and courage to get up at night to go to the toilet! 

A simple but amazing thing that we got to do on camp was… dun dun dunnnnnnn, eat! Trish was the chef that made us all of our meals and those meals, let me tell you were incredible. For lunch we would have rolls, burgers or wraps with vegetables and meat in them that we got to chose from which was fun. We also had lots of other great food. On the last day of camp when we were going to say thank you to Trish we started a chant that went, we want Trish, we want Trish, we want Trish, etc. 

Then we packed our bags and came home.

Camp was so fun and we were all very lucky to have the great experience of Toonalook. 

Here is a video of our time there:

Have you ever been to Toona? How was your experience there? If not then what is your favourite place you’ve been?

Hard Road Ahead Reflection

This terms integrated focus was a really big one. We focused on the Ballarat Gold Rush and Eureka Stockade. I learnt lots from what it was like on the Gold Rush to what happened on the night they stormed eureka. (That’s a book by the way and I will tell you more about that later on).

The reason that people went to the gold rush was usually to have a chance to struck it rich with gold. another reason is only if you came from Ireland and this is the potato famine. The potato famine is when people 1 ran out of potatoes but 2 barely had enough food for themselves or family. This is something that I learned i this unit. I also learned lots of important dates including. 1770, first European sighting of Australia, 1835, early gold findings, 1848, California gold rush, 1851, Australian gold rush and most importantly was 1854 which was the eureka stockade then there was 1858, welcome nugget was found. 

I also learned what the eureka stockade was. It was a fight between the soldiers (police) and the miners because they couldn’t afford their mining licenses and that they weren’t treated fairly. They couldn’t vote or anything. Only people who owned a certain amount of property could vote. They built a big stockade from trees and branches to defend themselves from the soldiers who at night stormed the stockade and killed around 27 miners and 7 soldiers. Later on the miners won the case in court and finally got rights.

Some important figures of the time were Peter Lalor who was one of the main diggers helping to defend against the soldiers in the battle. James Bentley who owned the eureka hotel and bought his way out of jail after killing James Scobie. He killed James because he broke a window at his hotel. James eventually went to jail. 

After we learned all about the gold rush and eureka stockade at camp (sovereign hill) we came back to school and started our dioramas. We had already been put into groups and assigned buildings to make. I was with Dillon who helped me build the Gold Office. We used a box and painted it white, then we put in some wallpaper and most importantly a lot of gold! We had safes, chairs, benches, gold blocks (nuggets) and gold in jars. At the gold office you can trade gold that you’d found or got for money.

We had to make a newspaper in our integrated unit but we usually did it in literacy. I made mine about Master William Brown and how he had burned down the gold office. We also had to do some small stories on the side of the newspaper. I made mine about how they had 30% off at the hope bakery and how a Japanese person changed the gold prices from pounds to yen! This was a lot of fun. By doing this we learned the important features both written and structural of a newspaper. We also learned a bit about the language we had to use. Not a whole different language like Chinese but what way we would say something.

In maths we both did things based on our integrated unit and just our normal maths. We made a birds eye view map of our diorama with grid references, key(legend), compass and scale. We then got to make a video about how to get from one place to another in mathematical language. We also learned a lot about volume. I was really excited after this because now I finally know how to calculate the volume of a sphere. Think how many things that I could calculate the volume of in real life now! We also did a angles unit where we learned about each of the different types of angles. I learned about vertically opposite angles, corresponding angles and more. 

My class and I have used so many of the PLA’s and I think that we could’ve used the all, of them but here are some of the main ones. We used a lot of creativity when we had to design our building. We had pictures to reference to but we had to make somethings up though keeping it historically accurate. We also had to use resilience. This was because when we were building our dioramas not everything always went to plan. We had to change our plan if this happened. 

‘The Night They Stormed Eureka’ is a book by Jackie French. It is about this girl who basically went back in time to when the gold rush was happening. She was taken into a family. She always knew what was going to happen like the exact night that the eureka stockade was because she had learnt about it in her history class. I won’t say any more before I spoil the book though.

I’ve had a great term and have really enjoyed learning about the Gold Rush and eureka stockade.

What important people do you know of from the 1850s (Gold Rush/ eureka stockade)?

Book Week Voting.

For the last few weeks in library we’ve been focusing on the short listed books. We have been reading them and then judging them by the following criteria; layout, images and information.

A good non fiction book includes:

Pictures, every non fiction book needs these to make the reader interested.

Eye catching and purposeful layout. This is very important because you can’t just put words and images on a page and call it a book. You need to lay them out over the page purposely to help the reader find the information easily.

Humour, humour helps interest the reader and really make them enjoy the topic that you’re writing about.

My favourite and highest scored book was Make Believe it almost got a perfect score except there is always room for improvement! The book had lots of images of illusions. I really enjoyed reading this because there was always something fun to do on each page. I really enjoyed the images for this reason. The layout was incredible. It was really organised with pictures and text. I always knew which text went with each picture for this reason. The book included different sized font for different headings and main text. The information was really good as well. The winner was Sorry Day and the two runner ups were Make Believe and The Happiness Box. I really enjoyed reading lots of new texts that I’ve never read and been able to judge them. 

If you judged these books which one had the highest score for you? If not what is your favourite non-fiction topic or book?

Neon Update Year 5 Market

This blog post is going to be about how my year 5 market group are going. 

My group is called ‘Neon Gang’, in the group are me, Grace, Tom, Mia and Ned. 

So far we have made our chip packet keychains, painted rocks, water colour bookmarks and stress balls. We have also got all of the equipment that we need for our ‘shoot for loot’ basketball game. We don’t need to make anymore items but we still need to make some discount cards for our products if we need to lower the price.

A challenge for me was that I was assigned to make the chip packet keychains and I hadn’t made them before so I had to look on YouTube and I saw some videos and tried them but non of them worked and they looked absolutely terrible. Then I asked my friend who’d done them before and he told me how to do it, I tried his method and they turned out really good.

We used lots of communication because we had to talk a lot over the group chat on our iPads because we weren’t always at school when we had good ideas. We used a lot of collaboration as well because we all had to help each other made our products. We also used resilience when our products didn’t turn out how we wanted it to. 

Mia and I sent emails to Mr. Josh Frydenberg to ask if he could attend our Year five market. He said that he’d tell us if he could come when it was closer to the day because he was very busy with the election. Ned asked Kmart to donate a gift card and Grace asked Target to donate toys for prizes.

Someone who’s been working really well in the group is Grace, she has been making her items and posters. 

What item would you buy out of our chip packet keychains, painted rocks, stress balls or water colour bookmarks? Leave it in the comments. 

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New year, new class.

My first term in year 5 has gone past like the speed of light. There have been so many fun and exciting experiences that have been really enjoyable. Here is a few of those exciting times throughout term 1 year 5:

Maths:

Maths has been really fun this term because we have been focusing on multiplication and division. I have really enjoyed these because I have learnt a new skill. The skill is multiplying and dividing fractions. I now feel really confident with this and will always remember this skill. In maths extension this term on of the things that we did was a rubik’s cube type puzzle. We had these coloured blocks and had to build a 3x3x3 cube with non of the same colour on each face of the cube. This was a massive challenge but I ended up getting the answer. 

APS:

APS is new this year because we start it in year 5. We usually would get to put down preferences down for what sport we do but this term we were training for a triathlon. We did swimming, rock climbing and biking even though we run instead of climb in the race. I really joyed biking because we got to go up hills, go through trees and I jumped over a log on my bike. I also really enjoyed rock climbing because it was a challenge but the feeling of achievement that you get when you climb to the top is just amazing. In APS we had to use courage because some of these activities we have never done and we might be pushing ourselves out of our comfort zone. We also needed to use resilience to push through the times when something might be very challenging like in rick climbing. One of the main areas of the PLA’s that we had to use was team work because there was a lot of times where we were in a group and had to work as a team. In swimming my group also did 12 laps of 25m. That is 300m! I did 3 laps of breaststroke and 9 laps of freestyle. It was tiring!

Classes:

This year I have a new teacher and his name is Mr. Benwell. He is my first male teacher! There is also 40 new children in the year which means 10 in each class. We also have lots of the previous children ta this school. Mr. Benwell is also an AFL goal umpire so I can see him on TV every once in a while. Mr. Benwell is a really great teacher and I am so lucky to have an amazing class.

House:

This year I have a year 1 buddy like all of the other year 5 students. So far we have only done the swimming carnival and our house came last :(. This was a bit disappointing but I had a really great time. Next we will have cross country and then the athletics day. We have to run about 3k for cross country!

Music lessons:

This year I have joined a guitar group called the Spanish guitars. We have already performed a piece called Russian dance and are learning to more pieces, one called the Grassy Turf and the other Austairius (I don’t know how to spell it) which we will be performing with a mandolin group at a festival.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my post about my term in year 5 and have learnt a bit more.

What year are you in and what is your favourite subject?