Friday with Ms Gain

Today we listened to the story of ‘The Three Legged Cat’ by Margaret Mahy. We then wrote some descriptions for the main characters in the story who were:

• Tom the three legged cat,
• Cyril the swagman, and
• Mrs Gimble of 7 Cardamom Street.

Here are some of our descriptions:

Oscar:
‘Tom the cat is a fat tabby tom cat. He is a three legged cat. He is a ginger cat. He is good at dreaming. He is good a snuggling up.’

‘Cyril the swagman travels around the world. He has a stinky old hat. He is a prowler. He is bald.’

‘Mrs Gimble doesn’ like earthquakes or prowlers and especially doesn’t like prowling through earthquakes. She likes furniture.’

Georgie:
‘Tom the cat is big. He is a 3 legged cat with a wooden leg. He is a ginger tabby cat. He is a warm cat which makes him a fantastic hat. He likes food. He dreams of exploring the world.’

Alana:
‘Tom the cat is good at curling his tail up and going to sleep. Tom is ginger and he dreams of going around the world.’

Noah:
‘The explorers hat is a cat with a broken leg. A cat who has warm fur and likes to go to sleep. That makes him the perfect hat.’

After we had all had a go at writing our own character descriptions we wrote one as a whole class as a piece of shared writing. This is what we came up with when we all worked together sharing our ideas:

‘Cyril is an adventurous swagman who likes to explore the world and sleep under the stars. He has an old scruffy Russian hat to keep his bald head warm when he prowls.

Cyril likes to talk about travelling around the world and the adventures he has. He doesn’t like talking about furniture polish or about the indoors. He likes the outdoors.

Mrs Gimble doesn’t like anything that prowls. She doesn’t like hearing about Cyril talk about prowling through earthquakes. It makes her scared and worried. She is always worried about what her nosey neighbours who pry and spy think about her brother.’


You can see in our writing that we tried to include:

• some long descriptive sentences AND short sentences,
• interesting words, and
• lots of information to really describe the character in detail.

Today we also continued work on our Flat Stanley project. We looked at Australia in detail today, using our atlases to find answers to questions about places in Australia including:

• Different cities including: Sydney, Brisbane, Canberra, Adelaide, Melbourne, Darwin, and Perth
• Uluru (Ayers) Rock,
• The Great Barrier Reef,
• The Tasman Sea, and
• Tasmania.

We also looked at the Australian flag and learnt that the stars on the flag symbolise the Southern Cross, which is a pattern of stars (constellation) that you can see from Australia (and New Zealand too). We also drew different Australian animals including: echidnas, koalas, crocodiles, platypuses, kangaroos, snakes, dingos, wombats and more.




We finished the day with the story of ‘Josephine Wants to Dance’ by Jackie French. This was an appropriate book because the ballet came to Muritai School this week and the book was full of Australian animals including brolgas and lyrebirds, which were new to many of us.