5/6C’s Class Blog 2008

Mrs C has been playing with a new tool, Zoho Creator. It’s tricky but she thinks she’s got the basics worked out, sort of anyway. She used the tool to make the Blog user survey below – please fill in the form! Thanks,

The first week of the holidays is almost over already – as the saying goes, time flies when you’re having fun! What is everyone up to in the holidays?

This illustration was made using Spell with Flickr. A very cool tool. The images used are from Flickr groups which specialise in collecting photos of letters, digits and punctuation marks.  I found the link on Division 16’s blog, Huzzah. They are a grade 6 class in Canada who have been blogging for a couple of weeks. They have a great blogroll which includes many student and grade blogs, including ours!

In the first week of September our school took part in some activities to mark National Literacy and Numeracy week in Australian schools. The festivities began on Monday with a games afternoon outside. We played all kinds of games that honed our English and maths skills – Scrabble and Boggle were favorites of the senior students.

Then we took part in the coin toss activity. We threw 20 cent pieces at a target from distances of 1m, 1.5m and 2m, and tallied the results. It was much harder than we thought it would be to get the coin to stop on the target – many of them hit the bullseye but then rolled away!

The results of the nation-wide activity are now in – you can see them all here. It seems many schools had similar results to ours!

Image: prufrock27 on Flickr under Creative Commons Attribution Licence

We’ve been working on our wiki, so now there are pages made by most of our students. Some people have posted VoiceThreads, others have adopted cyberpets and some students have a whole array of different items. It still early days, but we are loving the ease with which we can publish on a wiki. Come and visit on the link below:

Glitter Text Generator

In maths we have been looking at 3D shapes. This week we made some models using, as we call them, cubithings; then we drew our models on isometric line paper and shaded the drawings. We’re pretty pleased with our results. Here are two examples for you to admire; the top one is Cointha’s work and the other one is Darianne’s.   

A map of the world

Originally uploaded by Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the BPL

Think you know about the world? Know your countries, capitals and landmarks? Have a go at this game on our wiki – but be warned, it’s hard!

Have a close look at this map – especially where Australia is. This map was made in 1725, well before Captain James Cook journeyed up the east coast. But you can see that about half of the continent had already been mapped by this time.

We’ve been exploring large numbers, noting how they become much easier to read when you put them in groups of three. But if you want to know how to read and write really big numbers, this Math Cats site is a great resource! From this I discovered that after the ones group, the following groups of three digits are, in order, the following:

• thousand, million, billion
• trillion, quadrillion, quintillion
• sextillion, septillion, octillion
• nonillion, decillion, undecillion
• duodecillion, tredecillion, quattuordecillion
• quindecillion, sexdecillion. septendecillion
• octodecillion, novemdecillion, vigintillion
• unvigintillion, duovigintillion, trevigintillion
• quattuorvigintillion, quinvigintillion (and yes, it goes on further!)

So, 98,765,432,101,234,567,890,987,654,321,014,872,589,369,096,385,

274,109,876,543,210,123,456,789,015,907,530

can be read as: ninety-eight quinvigintillion, seven hundred sixty-five quattuorvigintillion, four hundred thirty-two trevigintillion, one hundred one duovigintillion, two hundred thirty-four unvigintillion, five hundred sixty-seven vigintillion, eight hundred ninety novemdecillion, nine hundred eighty-seven octodecillion, six hundred fifty-four septendecillion, three hundred twenty-one sexdecillion, fourteen quindecillion, eight hundred seventy-two quattuordecillion, five hundred eighty-nine tredecillion, three hundred sixty-nine duodecillion, ninety-six undecillion, three hundred eighty-five decillion, two hundred seventy-four nonillion, one hundred nine octillion, eight hundred seventy-six septillion, five hundred forty-three sextillion, two hundred ten quintillion, one hundred twenty-three quadrillion, four hundred fifty-six trillion, seven hundred eighty-nine billion, fifteen million, nine hundred seven thousand, five hundred and thirty.

 Can you read these numbers?

•  981,564,987,258,654,957,153
• 6,547,845,528,812,585
• 678,558,426,423,168,746,585,468,742,337

Here’s another site about big numbers, the MegaPenny Project. Check out the pictures of a million pennies (US one cent coins) and the 1,000,000 cows!

Today we had a visit from our 50th country, according to Google Analytics. Most of our visits have been from Australia (of course!), with the United States second and Canada and the United Kingdom pretty much tied for third. There are many countries from which we have had only one visit, most of which do not have English as their first language. I wonder how many of these visitors have used our translation widget?

On the map pictured above, the darker the color the more visits we have had from that country. We are a bit light on for African visitors, and we’d love someone from Russia to visit – that would color a huge section of our map! Is anyone able to help us out with visitors from new places?