M is for Matariki

We have had a great week sharing and learning about Matariki this week.  Matariki is the Maori New Year.  We shared a great book and the children did some lovely writing.

We have had lots of nice activities around Matariki

We made fish kites.

We made fairy bread in the shape of stars so we could share kai.

We did star art.

We made tiki necklaces.

We were creative with sparkly playdough.

We did weaving.

We enjoyed seeing pictures and learning about how Deandra's family celebrate the the Sri Lankan New Year.

B is for birthdays!

Not only is it Redwood Schools birthday this weekend, it is also Sija's!

We got to enjoy some lovely treats today - big thanks to Sija and her family for looking after us!

S is for Sausages

Thank you all for supporting our fundraising efforts.  Our sausage sizzle was very successful.  A special thanks to all our helpers on the day.  The children enjoyed being a part of the project.

We sold around 350 sausages and raised $564.00.  Our kind builder will use this to purchase the materials needed to work on this project.

All of the money coming in!

Busy on the barbeque!

Working in the kitchen!

Sausages, sausages and more sausages!

And the main team is rewarded for their hard work!

C is for Change

Check out the proposal that we presented to Mrs Goodin today...

B is for Book Week

What a lot of fun Book Week has been.  Our school library looks great and has been rethemed "Books are Windows into Worlds".  There were lots of fun activities this week at school, we loved having Juliette MacIver visit and share her books with us.

We were lucky to have her read her newest book Gwendolyn to us...we were the first children in New Zealand to see this book...can't wait for it to hit the shops!

We love her Maramaduke stories .. it was very cool when she sang her song to us ...
Juliette MacIver

K is Ka Pai

Ka Pai Room 6 - you did an awesome job of sharing the Korero Mai song with your buddy class,  and your Pepeha's at our school assembly.  I was very proud of you and am sure all the families who stayed were too.

Click the link below to see the slide show of the children's work.

Room 6 Pepeha

P is for Pepeha

We have had a great first week back, Term 2 has started well in Room 6.

We are busy working on our Pepeha's.  The children all have a line each to learn, you might have helped them at home.

Today we got busy doing a display.  It is still "a work in progress"

We are planning on getting these finished over the next week to have ready to display while doing our assembly presentation.

You are welcome to join us at our School Assembly next Friday 13th May in the hall at 9:10.

O is for One Hundred

Today we had a big catch up on our 100 days at school.  We have been counting each day we have been coming to school since the beginning of the school year.  When we get to 100 days we will celebrate!  We have been so busy lately that we have lost track of the day.

Miss Gargan told the children that we have been coming to school for

"one day less than 1/2 of 100" 

and we had to work it out.

We used the abacus to work out what 1/2 of 100 is.  Charlotte showed us 1/2 of 100 and it looked like this ...

We counted in 5's...5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, 50.

We also could show 1/2 of 100 like this ...

We counted this in 10's...10, 20, 30, 40, 50

1 less than 50 looks like this ...

So we are up to day 49!

We updated our display to show 49 in lots of different ways - 

Then we got a challenge -

The children worked in small groups to solve this problem - well done Room 6!

M is for Morning Question!

We had a great morning question today!  It was related to the book Love You Forever by Robert Munsch.  It is a beautiful book and fits very nicely with our topic of change.

Our morning question has such great learning - we had some good discussions around the question, we do statistical learning as well as number knowledge.

I think the parents were a bit surprised by what the children considered most fun!!!

Based on this data we came up with the following statements - 

Miss Gargan asked a new questions - the answers are very interesting!!

After these discussions we did some number knowledge work with this data.

There was lots of good maths going on.  

*The children were able to count all the names and get an answer of 13.

*Using our knowledge of adding 1 we knew that 9+1 makes 10.  We used our fingers to double check this.

*Next we worked on the problem 10+3 - we used the counting on stragety and put the biggest number 10 in our heads, and counted on 3 - 10....11, 12, 13.

*One clever child made the observation that there are 14 children in our class but only 13 had answered the questions.  More maths!!  Subtraction this time - 14-13=1.

Did you know we did all that with our morning question???

R is for Reading Eggs

The last couple of weeks have just flown by!  What a treat to have 5 days off for the Easter break before the end of term.

Our collaborative teaching in Rooms 6 and 7 has been working very well.  Both teachers feel that the students are getting the best learning with this approach.

Over the past couple of weeks we have spent time introducing the children to the Reading Eggs programme.  Deb our teacher aide has been supporting them during reading rotation times.  The kids are doing great and we encourage you to use this programme at home to support their learning.  

The biggest challenge we face in class is having the students sign on and off the ipads using their personal logins.  If you can encourage them at home to do this independently it will help us during class time.