Butterfly Lady

We were so lucky to have a special visit from the Butterfly Lady today! We loved her hat and her bright butterfly top!
We learnt all about the different stages of the life cycle. We didn't know the first thing a caterpillar eats is the egg it hatches from. We also learnt about how the caterpillar makes the shape of the letter J when it begins to change into a chrysalis.
Mrs Stevenson dressed up into a butterfly outfit. She had 6 legs, 2 long antenna, many eyes, beautiful wings, and a long tongue called a proboscis.

Can you remember all the different stages of the life cycle?

Fractions - Cupcakes in a mug baking

As part of our fractions rotation children have been working with a buddy to reading a recipe with lots of fractions in, and discussing what that means and finding the right measuring cups/spoons to use for each ingredient.  Please feel free to remake these at home.  If you can come up with some new cupcake recipes that help you and your children discuss fractions at home, please feel free to share these in the comments below so that this post becomes a resource for everyone.

Here are some photos of the kids with their finished cupcakes, just before they go into the microwave for 2 minutes.

Here is the link to the recipe we used for this lesson.

 

 

 

Fractions Wall building

This week our team has been having lots of learning about fractions.  We have been rotating around different activities including Fractions wall making, Playdough shape cutting, Fractions colouring, and Fractions BAKING!

There is a Explain everything about the Fractions Wall making.  Watch this space for more examples from our fractions week.

Found Poems - Get NZ Writing

Here are some examples of Found poems that we created.  We looked them up and decided they were a bit like blackout poems.  Below are some examples of what we came up with.

To make them we had to start with a piece of text.  We decided that rather than using a newspaper we would use some of the story we had focused on last week.  And why not ... MONSTERS are ALWAYS a fun topic.

Second we spent time finding and circling key words that we liked in the writing.

Next we found words that would link our key words together.

Finally we spent time blacking out the rest of the words on the page.  

Maia                               Parani                           Ruby

 Kayelani                        Sara                         Charlee

 Liam                             Aiden                           Stella

 Laylah                            Olivia

Get NZ Writing Package

In Team Maunga we have been learning lots about writing letters and postcards this term.  This was leading us up to sending a package to a school in Stratford.  Here are some images of us getting our package ready to send.  Remember to ask us about what we should include in a Letter or Postcard (or ask us about how we use WETA for letter writing / Postcards.  For more information on this please look up other posts on this topic.

Preparing the postcards and messages.

Taking photos to explain the rock we included in our parcel

  Revisiting statistics work from the beginning of the year to work out how many siblings we have altogether.  We loved using Tally marks to help work this out.

 Researching who could lick their elbow (not all children have photos here so ask your child if this was them).

Working out who our tongue rollers were (again there were more children than we have images of here so ask your child about this).

 

 Sealing the package and Posting it at our Local NZ Post shop.

THANKYOU SO MUCH FOR THIS AMAZING EXPERIENCE WAREHOUSE STATIONARY!

My Worm Farm

The Wind Surfers (reading group) have been having fun with their reading.  Their reading goal is to read fluently the words on the page and to follow each word.  They are getting pretty good at it.  As a result we decided to recreate the worm house story with photos of us making one.  We invited a group of Maunga Iti learners to join us.  Our Boogie boarder reading group who use iPads lots helped to make these look and sound amazing.  Well done Everyone!

  

Learning about letters and postcards

Here are some examples of writing work we have done in class around letters and postcards.  We were really lucky to have a monster write us letters that we got to write letters back to.  We also were writing letters to send to a buddy class in Stratford, and Easter bunny wasn't to far away either.  These provided us all with motivation to write letters, below are a few links to work and things we did to help us develop great letter writing skills.

This Explain everything was something we did right at the start of us learning about postcards.  We were learning where things went on a post card and the types of things we could write for both a letter and postcard.  Well done Nicole.

This is an activity we did as part of our shared book.  This helped us see how letters are great not just for writing but also for reading too.  We had great fun doing this Explain everything.  Well done Sage.

Here is an example of a letter that Stella wrote to the Easter bunny.  As you can also see we discussed what things would make our letters better as a class, and Stella was able to take her writing away and pop it into an explain everything to record what she will do next to improve her letter writing.  This was a great reflection process for all children.  Well done on your presentation Stella.

By Stella