Week 9 - Word Works Star

Here we go again with 3 Minute Frenzy Stars

Congratulations Levi, Jemima and Beau.  Remember everyone to keep practicing writing word families as this is a way to get quicker at writing as many words in 3 minutes as you can.  Start with ones like 'at, cat, mat, sat, bat, rat, that, spat...' then move on to other ones like 'it, fit, bit, sit, mit, kit ...'. 

Coding with Tania

Today Mrs G's reading groups were lucky to get to work with Tania who is helping us learn 'computational thinking'  and 'coding'   We talked about writing a program that would make our car move across an ipad screen, by giving it specific instructions like move forward 3, back 4.

Once we were able to do this, we went off to choose a new background and create other program sentence 'algorithm'.  Watch out for another post with videos of some of the algorithms that we created.

Maths with Mrs Ogle Week 8

This week we had Mrs Ogle come and visit our class again to help us all with our math's.  This was fantastic to be able to all see how far we have come in this math's journey this year (and to get some ideas of where to head next.  

We began the session by counting in different ways, and with different patterns.  E.g. in 2's (using a 'sit, stand' pattern) in 3's (using a 'sit, sit, stand' pattern) and in 4's (using a 'sit, sit, sit, stand' pattern).

 Dianne's Problem was one that she used at different levels across our whole school and Team Maunga focused on going up to the number 20 to solve the problem and answer a number of question about it.

The problem told us that :  Andrew had 20 biscuits.  He iced every second one, put a cherry on every 3rd one and every 4th got a chocolate button.  Some of the questions the children answered about this problem included, how many biscuits had icing on them, how many biscuits had nothing on them  and could a biscuit have all 3 things on them.  This caused LOTS of discussion, problem solving, drawing to find the answers and using materials to answer it too.

Like normal we all came back to share some of the great work we did and today we all stood around a table where a group had used materials to clearly show what was happening with the problem.

Interestingly a few days latter, these 2 cute monkeys were spotted practicing their patterns using our 100's board.  Well done Jemima and Taysia for keeping the learning alive!

Week 8 - 3 Minute Frenzy

This week Maggie joined the word works group in room 6 and did her first 3 minute frenzy in her book.  She did great and achieved 12 words with Mrs G helping her to think about words. 

This week Mrs G set the challenge for the rest of our word works group to complete their 3 minute frenzy without her prompting them with words to write.  This was quite a challenge but despite this Harley and Nakita achieved their personal best and in Nakita's case, she met goal of 21 words for this week.  Well done both Harley and Nakita.

Keep up the great work everyone, I really love seeing what you can do.

Wearing White for as a sign of Peace and Unity

As a result of events that happened in Christchurch on Friday 15th March, our school joined with a number of other schools in wearing white as a sign of peace and unity for all cultures and nations that call NZ home.  Here are a few pictures that were taken on the day to share with the other school who also joined us in wearing white.

Week 7 - 3 Minute Frenzy Stars

Here are week 7's  3 Minute Fenzy Stars.  One of them almost doubled her score from last week and got 20.  Well done Ivy L.  Well done also to Nerali and Aston, who continue to improve their scores each week! 

Fantastic work everyone!

Ivy L

 Nerali                                                        Aston

Swim Safe Movies from week 5 & 6

Here are the swim safe movies from weeks 5 & 6.  Now we have shared them at assembly you will be able to share them with all your friends and talk about all the important learning that can be done around swimming safely both in pools, oceans and rivers.

We are incredibly lucky as New Zealanders that we have so many opportunities to enjoy the water, but it is also very important that we help all our children enjoy it safely.

Enjoy, remember to comment and ask questions to help our children further their own learning by answering your questions.

Part 2

Part 3

Swim Safe Week 6 Term 1 2019

Again we had swim safe this week.  This week we were continuing to practice and learn about keeping safe if we fall into water.  Tracey has been very impress at how each week we have improved with what we have been doing with her.  

This week we did lots of practice around tilting our heads and floating on our backs.  This is till quite challenging for many of us so we will keep working on this both in our classroom swimming sessions as well as our next swim safe lesson next week.  

So to re-cap.  Here are the things we have been learning.

1. How to break the water with our hounds to protect ourselves
2. How to go into a mushroom float (so we pop up to the surface safely and don't panic)
3. How to move from this mushroom float to a position where we can kick on our fronts to safety.
4. How to go from a kicking on our front position to a floating on our back position.

We have made our learning into rewindable movies but will share them with you all at assembly next week (and it will also pop up on our blog this day for you all to enjoy at home as well).

Week 6 Term 1 - 3 Minute Frenzy

Here is this weeks 3 Minute Frenzy Stars.  They are showing both how they can write words quickly and also improve their own personal bests.  Well done Nerali, Harley and Rakai.  Keep working hard.  We can't wait to see what you can achieve by the end of this year!

Strep Throat & Rheumatic Fever

Today we had visitors in to our school to talk to us about how they come into our school to do throat swabs on Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays.  They reminded us all of the importance of washing our hands and coughing into our arms to help prevent the spread of nasty bugs and also of the importance of taking all the medicine if we need to have them.

Here are some photos of us at the assembly.

Swim Safe Week 5 Term 1 2019

This week in Swim Safe we have been practicing what to do if we find ourselves falling into deep water.

Here are a few things we were learning.

1. How to break the water with our hands to protect ourselves
2. How to go into a mushroom float (so we pop up to the surface safely and don't panic)
3. How to move from this mushroom float position to a position where we can kick to safety.  (this is the one most of us are working on lots as we tend to want to put our feet down still).

You can help us at home if you have a pool by getting us to practice these 3 things and encouraging us not to put our feet down when we move into the kicking position.

• Our next step is to be able to roll onto our backs by tilting our head towards the closest edge (so we move in the right direction).

Floating on our backs is also very important for us to keep practicing as this enables us to catch our breath and remain safe while in the water.

Here are some photos from this week.  We have a team of children making our video footage into another movie, so watch this space.

Week 5 Term 1 - 3 Minute Frenzy

Again this weeks 3 Minute Frenzy showed great results.  We are getting quicker at writing words and thinking through word families more to help us do this.  Writing words quickly helps us with both our spelling and our story writing as well, as it speeds us up with writing both sounds and high frequency words. 

This week we continued to see children improving their scores.  This week we had someone also get more than 20 words.  Great work guys.  Can't wait to see what we will be able to achieve by the end of the term (and even the end of the year!)

Here are our 3 Minute Frenzy Stars this week.