Making a whirlpool

Here we all are making a whirlpool on our last day of swimming.  We all made great progress over our two weeks of lessons. 

Ode to Ange - our amazing Teacher Aide

Tui in the Tree - the Play

Here is the play we performed after our term of learning all about NZ native birds.  This was a play from a school journal which we adapted to add in some different birds. 

Tui in the Tree - The experts introduce the birds

We performed our play to to our parents last Friday.  Here are the experts introducing the different birds in the play. 

It's a bird song performance

"It's a bird" song performance performed at junior sharing afternoon. 

Cheeky Little Fantail song

Here are the talented fantail dancers performing at the Junior sharing afternoon last week for those of you who couldn't make it along. 

Songs for Junior Sharing Day

We are learning these two songs for our Junior sharing day so please help your child to practice them and to learn all the words.

Bird Sketching

We have been observing some different birds, both native NZ and introduced birds. These are some of our sketches. 

The New Birdhouses

Archie's family donated 2 birdhouses to our school. We painted them and then wrote to Mr Scales (our Caretaker) to ask for two poles to put them on.  Mr Scales and Penney put the poles in and mounted our new birdhouses.  We are now going to start researching all about birds to see what we need to feed them and how to encourage them into our garden. 

Circle Art

We are now in our wonderful new learning space.  This is a sample of some of the first art we have put up to brighten our new walls.

Our BIG day out!

This term we were lucky enough to go on a day trip to the museum, the Botanical Gardens and the YMCA.  We all went on the bus.  We had lots of lovely parents who came and helped us.  The scavenger hunt around the museum was a highlight.  The best part of the museum was the Discovery Room.

We had our lunch around the Peacock Fountain in the gardens.  It was such a beautiful day in the sunshine.

At the YMCA we went on a big scavenger hunt around the gardens.  Then we went back to the YMCA and played lots of fun games like Weetbix eating competitions,  the egg game, guess what's in the bag and musical chairs.

Thanks to everyone who made it such an awesome day!

Symmetry Hunt

We have been learning all about symmetry in our classroom.  We used all sort of maths equipment in our room and made symmetrical shapes.  then we used a piece of wool to find the line of symmetry.  

Vegetable Soup

Last week our food of the week was onions.  We used onions to flavour our vegetable soup.  Ethan and Isla helped to saute the onions in butter to make them soft in our vegetable soup.  We all helped to make the soup by peeling, slicing and dicing the veges, adding the water and stirring the soup.  We cooked our soup overnight in the crockpot.

the next morning we came to school and our classroom smelt wonderful!  We all tasted the soup and most of us loved it and even had seconds.  We wrote instructions about how to cook the soup.

Here is Yina's recipe... she has remembered every step and put it in order.

Symmetry in Motion

We have loved exploring shapes and symmetry this term.  We have been learning to find lines of symmetry in different shapes and also making shapes that are symmetrical.  We made these creations with different maths equipment  in our classroom.  Then we used pieces of wool to show where the line of symmetry would be.

Making Hulk Juice

Our school is participating in the What's for Lunch? Food of the Week and Reduce, Reuse, Recycle programme this term. This week we have been learning about spinach. Spinach is rich in antioxidants. Antioxidants are good at getting rid of the bad stuff in our bodies. They are like the superheros of our bodies, who fight the bad guys to keep us healthy.

We made Hulk Juice with the spinach.  We all helped to make it and we ALL tried it.  Most of us thought it was delicious.  A few of us weren't so sure.  

We all wrote about what we did and then altogether we wrote a recipe.  You might like to try and make it at home.  

Badjelly the Witch

In the last week of the term, we enjoyed listening to the wonderfully imaginative story by Spike Milligan called "BADJELLY THE WITCH".  

We read the book and we listened to the story told by Spike Milligan himself.  On the last day of school we all drew our favourite character from the story and wrote a speech bubble to show what they would be saying.

We put it all together into a big mural for our classroom.  We have taken small snippets form the story and added them to our pictures so you can see how clever and creative we were.

We hope you enjoy it and maybe you and your family could listen to the whole story together. 

The day the rabbits came to school.

On the last day of the term, we had a special surprise from Archie's mum.  She brought their guinea pigs and rabbits in to school.  We were amazed because the rabbits could jump really high.  It was such a fantastic time.

Washing our Socks

We read the book "The Way it Was". This book looks at the way life was like for our great great grandparents.  We were quite fascinated with all the effort they had to go to just to do their washing. 

We wrote about what happens when our socks get washed.  Here are a sample of a few of our pieces of writing. 

Our Big Books this week

This week we have been reading two really fun big books in our class.  One was called "The Fun Bus'"and the other one one was called  "Captain Quake and Boss Bird".  Yesterday we shared our books with each other and did a couple of creative art responses.  

The Fun Bus

Captain Quake and Boss Bird

Our Winter Portraits

We had lots of fun making these gorgeous winter portraits.  We painted our background and our head and shoulders then we made hats with pom poms, gloves and a cup to finish them off.  They look fabulous on the wall in our new learning space. 

First day in our new learning space

Last Wednesday was our first day in our new learning space.  We have moved in here while the Junior block renovation is underway.  We are pretty lucky to be in such an inviting and user-friendly space and we are looking forward to making it our own space.