Current US time and date: 2:15 am, Monday 5/13/13
G'avo mates! (Avo is slang for 'afternoon'...add that one to the list!)
First off, let me apologize for the delay. I have been having quite the battle with my computer this past week. It seems to have run out of space and wouldn't allow me to add anymore wonderful pictures to it! No worries though, I think I temporarily won the fight, which is good news for you all because that means you can see the fun, scary, informative, cute pictures I took this past weekend! You thought I was a happy camper last weekend after seeing those kangas and other Aussie animals through the fences and glass? Well, you then you can only imagine how I felt this weekend when I got to do this:
That's right! I finally got to live my Australian dreams and pet, hold, feed, cuddle, and even kiss (see top right photo) this country's wonderful native animals! But, before I get more into that, let me start off by saying---and I know I'm late on this, that is my computer's fault for delaying this blog, so work with me here--happy Mother's Day to all your mom's out there and any moms reading this, including my own :) So, Miss Probasco's mommy dearest, if you're reading this, I've got a special message for you...
Miss you lots "mum"!
If you haven't guessed, this past week I did an art craft with my class for Mother's Day (Since they don't have art teachers, remember? So all the art is done in the room, and my teacher has asked me to teach art every week from here on out!). These are what we made! On the back the students wrote their poems-for-mom, which we also wrote last week during writing, and on the flowers they wrote something a little different. Rather than "I miss you", they wrote "I love you" and rather than the last flower saying "mum", they glued on pictures of themselves. The flowers were attached onto twine, and the flower pot opened like a pocket which is where we put the flower line; so, moms that received these were then able to pull the top piece of twine and up grew the message and picture! I thought it was a fun, cute craft, and I definitely enjoyed myself making it. If you have any birthdays coming up, you can make something similar for a card!
Working hard on their cards
Copying the poem from her draft book onto the flower pot
And this is who helped us clean up after art. Meet Fudge! One of the girls in my class just got her. Fudge is 10 weeks old--how precious. She came in to pay us a visit at the end of the day, and everyone loved her (including Barbie!)
Aside from this craft and cute visitor, last week was standard. We did a lot more work on reading and writing for the NAPLAN (They start tomorrow! Yikes!) and worked with fractions, decimals, and percentages in math. We were comparing decimals the one day, and I was teaching since I've been doing math, and I taught the kids the "invisible zero" strategy as well as the "line up" strategy. They seems to have helped! We also were comparing fractions with different denominators, and I explained this by showing them how to cross multiply to find if fractions are greater than, less than, or equal to. As well, I taught them how to make fractions equivalent like I taught you all. I wish I had remembered my memory match game I made for you guys, that would've been a good one for them to play after that lesson. Do you remember that game during centers where you had to find which fractions were equal? It seemed like everyone had fun playing it, so maybe I'll make a new one as something fun for these students to play too!
I talk about you all a lot while I'm teaching--I've recently noticed that. You're all such great models, I can't help but bring your class up as I'm teaching this stuff that I already did with you guys! Next week, after NAPLANs are done, we're moving onto mean, median, and mode. I'm excited to teach all that to them. Maybe I'll have them play a little Jeopardy again? Or the MathPlayground games? What do you think? I'm going to have to tell them about the Mountain Math that you guys do and how there are mean, median, and mode problems on that every week. They'll probably be impressed you've been doing it for so long.
Anyway, as I said, the week was pretty standard except for Friday. On Friday I got to go on a field trip (or 'excursion' as they call it) to the Sydney Aquarium! Only kindergarten ('kindie') through second grade ('year two') went, but they asked the other Penn State student teacher and myself to come along too, which was pretty awesome. We had to be at the school at 6:30 and left by 6:45. It's a two hour bus ride there, but thankfully the busses we took had TVs so we watched movies. I saw 'Horton Hears A Who' for the first time on the bus, it was so funny!
Once we got to the aquarium, we ate our snacks then went on in. I saw some pretty awesome fish and animals there and took so many pictures. Take a look at some of my favorites:
Patty the Platypus?
Beautiful jellyfish
Check out the size of this crab! He made me awfully hungry for some crab legs :)
Japanese spider crabs, eeeek! Imagine seeing these things in the ocean!
One of the year one students measuring herself to a spider crab leg
Guess who....it's Bruce!
Awesome aquarium! All the fish swim right over top of you.
This is a dugong! Dugongs actually descend from elephants, crazy!
Miss Crane, the other PSU teacher, and me!
The dugong came over to say hello to the kids.
There's Bruce again!
Leopard shark
I don't know what kind of fish this is, but I thought it looked really neat.
I would surely get eaten by a lot of sharks, there are some that are nearly 2 times the size of me!
Barbie: "I'm in BIG trouble! ALL of these sharks are bigger than me!!"
This fish is awesome. It can change the color and texture of its skin!
Seahorses!
Fun fact about seahorses
What do you think that white thing is? A floating piece of coral?
Wrong! It's a seahorse! And all the coral-looking-stuff is actually attached to it!
The kids liked the stingrays
I found Nemo!
Barbie: "The Sydney Aquarium is full of such beautiful things!"
After the aquarium, we ate our lunches outside with a few friends...
Then we went for a walk to this playground where the kids played until it was time to go.
Over the Harbour Bridge and back to school! Look, there's the Opera House!
And that was my day under the sea! The next day, Saturday, I went a different route; no more sea creatures, onto Australian mammals and insects! I decided to go to a place I've heard a lot of my students tell me about. It's called "Reptile Park" and has tons of Australia's native animals in it--many of which are just walking around inside! Here's some pictures from that day:
This was the first thing I saw when I walked in: A huge Galapagos turtle walking around! He was 80-some years old!
And some more emu walking around. I kept my distance because they still terrify me!
A Tasmanian devil! It was so adorable, but sadly it was running around a bit too fast for me to catch a good picture. Google Image these animals, they're precious. They're also close to extinction because they're all dying off due to a terrible, contagious facial cancer.
More about that here:
Miss Crane and me holding a wombat! She was so cute and cuddly!
The wombat
This kanga is saying, "Whatchu lookin at??"
Meet Archie! We couldn't hold him because it's illegal to hold koalas in New South Wales, but we were able to pet him for a while.
Archie again
A dingo! They're wild dogs in Australia, but they look like just your average house dogs, don't they? I was saying how I want one as a pet, but apparently you can't tame a dingo to become a house pet. Some dogs may be bred with dingos though...
Playing with the kangaroos!!! My dream!
Someone wanted a snack.
Crikey! That's a big croc.
Meet Elvis!
This right here is one of the deadliest spiders in Australia. They live in the ground and are called funnel-web spiders.
Funnel-web spider again.
This one is another very deadly spider that is seen around here--my host mom sees them in the garage! The red-back spider.
Some information on what to do if ever bitten. I learned about what to do on my second day here! It's important for everyone to know this stuff since these spiders are so prevalent.
This spider, the Golden Orb Spider, I see every day at least 2-4 times a day! It has a web about 2 inches away from the passenger seat of the car so whenever I get in or out of the car, I have to shimmy past this little guy. Thankfully, he's harmless.
This big daddy was actually in the house a few weeks ago!! And he ran across my host-mom's foot the other day while she was out on the porch. I hope I never see one because I really think I'd have a heart attack.
Below is information on some of the common snakes in the area. Not only are they common, they're the deadliest. Great! The ones I've been warned about are the red-bellied snakes and the brown snakes. Those are spotted around here the most.
That's a brown snake! VERY deadly
A little dose of America! The American Alligator!
Big ole bullfrog! Anyone want to kiss it and see if it turns into a prince?
You guys thought you all love recess? You should see the kangaroos on the playground!
The cutest one :)
My wombat friend again!
She loved "getting pats" (which is the Australian way of saying 'being pet')
Here she is! Trotting over to me as I called her. Notice how as soon as I start petting her she lays down like a little dog. It was so cute! (If the video doesn't load, refresh the page. It's being funny for some reason)
Well, that was one long post, but I think I about summed up everything going on down here! I hope you had a nice weekend and have a great week! I have gotten emails from a few of you regarding your pen pals--I'm glad you like them! They're looking forward to hearing back from you all! Did anyone have any trouble understanding some of the things they were saying? They asked some pretty good questions and told you some interesting facts about Australia too, right? Hopefully they gave you enough to work with for a response letter!
Until next time, cheers!
-Miss Probasco ...and Barbie too!
P.S. Per your requests, I'm working on stealing that kangaroo to bring back to America for you all!
...one of these days I'll catch him.
Miss Probasco, We have your letters hanging in our hallway for other grade 5 students to read too with a map of Australia. My homeroom will work on the letters after reviewing some spelling. I shared some of the letters that were doubled up to the 3 students who didn't get their first letter completed so some of your students will be getting more than one letter as well. Thanks for teaching us about native animals in Australia...
ReplyDeleteMs. Michael and pals
Loved the blog. The pictures were great & I especially loved my Mothers Day card. Love you & miss you lots. Talk to you soon.
ReplyDeleteLove Mom