Mnemonics

ANZAC AT SHANTYTOWN

We went to Shantytown and studied ANZAC from the homefront. The boys learnt to march and the girls learnt to unravel old jerseys and knit. We wrapped parcels in brown paper and tied them with string. These parcels contained a letter, tissues (for the nose of latrine), a comb, a tiki, a candle, a pencil and pad and some mints.  We dressed appropriately for the times.

Our lunches were in brown paper bags. We learnt to wrap bandages and then we bandaged up a wounded solider . He went away on the steam train and one of our students dressed as the Mayor and wrote a welcome home speech. Even though it was pouring with rain (and I mean pouring) we all went to the train station to welcome him home.

Each class made a wreath to lay at our ANZAC service which we held in the church as it was soooooo wet. We had all be learning the song 'Flanders Fields' so rather than somone reading out the poem we all sang this. 

We all had ANZAC biscuits (which weren't called that when the war was on only afterwards. They were called rolled oat biscuits and were sent away as they lasted such a long time. If they got too hard the soldiers could dunk them in their tea.

Basic Facts

We are focussing on improving our basic facts. Our latest thing is having a 'Factometer' on the wall. We have our pictures on this at the level we are working on. We have to work our way up the levels (they are  named like karate belts and start at white finishing with black), the higher you go the harder the work gets. We have 2 cards each day and 3 minutes to answer the problems on the card. Some people or moving up really quickly (this is because they are learning them at home). It will be interesting to see what her next idea is for trying to motivate to learn them.

ANZAC ART

One of the borders of our school is the beach. It takes us 2 mins to walk across the field to the beach which we probably don't use as much as we should. We went to the beach to source white stones to paint ANZAC POPPIES on. 

As you can probably see there are ltos of grey rocks and it took us a while (we did play around a bit and enjoy the fresh air ) . We each had an idea about the size and shape of rock that we wanted and the teacher encouraged us to stick to that (another reason it took a little longer).

We looked at lots of poppies and each decided what we wanted our poppy to look like. Next we sketched our poppy design onto a our rock then painting  a black outline with a very fine brush. You had to take your time, hold the brush carefully and use small clear strokes. Once this was dry we filled in the outline.

We had planned to lie them amongst our crosses when we had our ANZAC service but it was pouring with rain so we were allowed to take them home or leave them on the classroom window sill.