Greats and Grands 2020 - Maunga

 Greats and Grands 2020 was again a great hit with both grandparents and students.  It is such a fantastic opportunity to see these generations together and sharing/connecting with each other.  Grandparents a such an important connection to our students.  This year in team Maunga we even had 'fill-in grandparents' as some whanau couldn't make it due to our current COVID-19 situation.  To those grandparents who traveled from across New Zealand to be with us; thank you so much.

As normal our morning started with an assembly but today was a little bit different as this was in front of a large crowd of visiting grandparents.  We performed our kapa haka with Matua Dwayne's help.  It also rained while we were performing so we had to quickly move to an inside space to continue.  This did not phase us at all!  

When we got to the new space, it was time to share a few speeches about our special people.  Evie, Hawaiki-Roa, James, and Tyler did an amazing job of sharing their work.  We were all very nervous but did a great job.  (We will upload 3 of these as movies at the bottom of this post)

After our assembly, we took our grandparents back to our classes to have a look around and to present them with special Tonga we had created, and a card and story about them.  We also had made little bookmarks that said things like 'I love you'.  Our grandparents were excited about these and most wore their Tonga for the rest of the time.  Mrs G snapped some pictures of us before we all headed back around the front for some yummy Kai.

After our yummy Kai, we did a quick jump jam with our grandparents (even as it started raining again).  Our normal games had been called off due to the weather.  All in all it was a fantastic day, making memories with our grandparents.

James                            Evie                               Hawaiki

Greats and Grands 2020 - Maunga Iti

Greats and Grands 2020 - Maunga Iti

We had a fabulous day last Friday celebrating our Greats and Grands. 

The day started with an assembly. Maunga were amazing with their Junior Kapa Haka performance. We really appreciated Matua Dwayne's support with his guitar and vocals. Giovanni, Manaia, Abraham, and Tayani presented their speech about their special person to the whole crowd! We were so proud to see them stand up in front of so many guests to share their writing. After assembly we took our greats and grands back to our classroom to show them our learning and present our gifts we had been working on this term, a special necklace toanga and a beautiful card with their writing. This was followed by a delicious morning tea. The weather changed our plans from whanau games to a group Jump Jam.

Thank you all who could come along!

 

Photos from Speech Assembly

Colin was very keen to try out the podium for our speech assembly so he opened the floor and welcomed everyone to the speech assembly for 2020.

Next Sadie and Tommy presented their speeches.

Following this Kaden and Quinn presented their speeches.

Here are the movies of them presenting their speeches.  Enjoy!

Sadie

Tommy

Quinn

Kaden

 

Speech Assembly 2020

This year with COVID-19 our school speech assembly wasn't able to take place as we would have liked, so rather than canceling it we postponed it until it was safe to hold this event altogether.

All children wrote speeches as part of our Term 3 learning and these were outstanding.  Quinn and Kaden were the children selected from Team Maunga Iti, and Amelia, Hannah, Tommy, and Sadie were selected from Team Maunga, to share their persuasive writing/speech making.

Here are their speeches, as they were great examples of what Year 1 and 2 students can strive to achieve.  (These will automatically play below so keep watching).

Angel Week 2020

 Each year Mrs G organizes an Angel week at school for all the teachers.  This is great fun for everyone as we get to all try and guess who is who's angel and ... WHO DOESN'T like getting presents and seeing others open them.  

Maunga are especially lucky as they become the Angel delivery service!  Here are some pictures of our little angels ready to go out and do some deliveries.

We had so much fun!  We can't wait for Angel week next year!

Covid - Can't touch that Movie

Now that our school movies have been Judged we can share this movie with you our Whanau.  

We are super excited because one of our movies has been selected to go forward to our Kaikohekohe Movie Event.  We are hoping that COVID won't stop this from happening.

When this other movie has been shared as part of this Kaikohekohe Event we will then share it here on our class blog!

We are super proud of our children and their movie-making efforts.

 

Te Tino O Te Taiamai - Stories

As part of our learning about our local area we all wrote stories (including Mrs G).  We also published them by creating a story map and then using Explain Everything to share and record our versions.  Our writing was amazing as we had so much to write about and it was a great experience for us all.  We hope you enjoy our work.

Rakaia

Amelia

Andrew

Tommy

Sadie

Subira

 

Sio

 

Colin

Tyler

Peri

James

Hawaiki-Roa

Te Tino O Te Taiamai - Shared book

Mrs G wrote a Story for our Shared book Last week, and we became the illustrators for our own book.  Then Mrs G turned it into a digital book that we could read whenever we wanted to.  WE LOVE IT!  

It was based on our visit to Te Tino O Te Taiamai.  This week while Team Moana was away at school camp we were also able to borrow Whaea Aimee to help us turn it into a Movie, where we were the stars.  We had so much fun learning and reading about our local landmark.  We also wrote our own stories which we published as well - We were so excited to share these with Matua Ken.

Below is our Digital book, and the Movie we made.  We will create another post with our amazing Te Tino O Te Taiamai Stories.

 

Chickens Hatching

This term we have been looking at life cycles. We have looked at the life cycles of butterfly's, frogs and chickens. As part of this we put some eggs in an incubator in our classroom. We had to work out what temperature to set the incubator to and what humidity it needed to be set at. When we found this out we were ready to begin. We turned the machine on and set the temperature to 37.5 degrees C and set the humidity to 55%. We made sure that the pump was working (to keep the humidity right) and that the machine was rotating the eggs. We then worked out when the eggs would hatch by counting and marking 21 days on a calendar. We also found out that we could 'candle' the eggs to see if they were growning. When we tried this at around day 11 we couldn't make this work, so we researched some more and then in groups of 1 or 2 we hid under a table that was covered in a big tarpaulin. We needed to make the space REALLY dark so the torch could show the inside of the egg. We saw lots of veins and could actually see the chickens moving inside the eggs. We were so excited. Then at around day 18 we stopped the incubator from moving and turned up the humidity. We watched and waited. Then on Cross Country day we popped out to the library and when we came back we had our first chicken. We were so happy but were a little sad that we hadn't seen it happen. We then went out to cross country. The next day when we arrived we saw 2 eggs with tiny holes in them (pipping). We used the ipads to record and project what was happening inside the incubator up onto our interactives. Then we finally saw not one egg hatching but two. A movie is attached below of a time lapsed movie that we have put together. We hope you enjoy.

One of our research teams at work!

Incubator all set up

We needed a darker space so we could Candle the eggs so here we are Crawling around under the table with Mrs G.

After our first chicken hatched (no sign before we went to the library and hatched before we got back).

Watching the second and third chickens hatching.

Our timelapsed video of some chickens hatching.

 

Cross Country 2020

 Today we had our cross country at school.  It was very different for us as normally it is an interschools competition but as we are in level 2 with COVID-19 it was just us.  We did FANTASTIC and really enjoyed ourselves anyway.  Here is a video of us this morning when we went to see where we needed to run.  This was a fun and helped us get ready for the afternoons real event.

After an early lunch we waited in age groups ready for our turn to run.  Everyone had photos taken at the end and these will be uploaded into students individual digital portfolio's.

Engaging reading through Coding instructions

Here is take 2 of our trial of using instructions to engage our readers more.  The idea is that it provides a focus and a real context for children to use their reading skills in.

Here is their work.  Don't forget to comment and let us know what you think!

Tommy

Subira

Peri 

James 

Evie

Engaging Reading through Coding instructions

In reading we have been trialing lots of different things to excite our readers in class.  What we plan to do is to use instructions as a reading task and children need to follow the instructions to either make something or do something.  Today the task was to use a Scratch instruction card to make characters move and dance.

We think they have done a great job.  What do you think?

 

Evie

James 

 

Peri 

 

Subira

 

 

Tyler

Project Energise with Matua Tupara

Project Energise with Matua Tupara

On Wednesday we had a fun Project Energise session with Matua Tupara.

We are learning to pass a netball in different ways. We are also learning to work as a team to move the ball around our team. At home you can practice passing a ball with each other. Maybe your child could show your whanau some of the games we played. Mrs Stevenson's favourite game was the sleeping cat cool down. We lay in the sun then pretended to wake up stretching out just like cats do!

We can’t wait until our next lesson with Matua Tupara!

Frog publishing

Last week we have had lots of fun writing and learning about Frogs and their life cycle.  We learned lots of interesting facts and practiced writing sentences that had interesting adjectives (describing words) and verbs (doing words).  At the end of the week, we published one of our stories and used a picture animation tool (ChatterKid) to record our stories to share for our assembly, and for our parents.  We were really proud of them.  We also had to learn lots about speaking with expression, clearly and loudly.  We also did lots of talking about background noise.

We hope you enjoy our movies.

Andrew

Colin

Tyler

Tommy

Subira

Sio

Sadie

MacKenzie

L'Sayn

James

Hawaiki

Hannah

Andrew

Butterfly Publishing

Children were super excited about this writing topic and many of them found lots of interesting facts about the life cycle of the butterfly.  Great work ALL of Team Maunga and Iti.  Here are a couple of examples of Explain Everythings that were created to publish children's writing this week.  

Andrew                                                                    Tommy

Pic Collage Life cycle work

So far this term we have spent a week looking at the life cycle of the butterfly and also this week the life cycle of a frog.  Students decided they wanted to present some of what they had learned at our class assembly.  

Here is an example of some work that a couple of students created.  They were able to use word cards around the room to independently create pic collages to explain the life cycle of a frog and a butterfly.  We used them as part of our assembly presentation.  Well done Evie, Hannah, and Subira for your great work.

Watch out for other examples of this work, on our blog!

      

Hannah                                                Subira

Evie

Assembly Term 3 2020

Last Friday we had our first school assembly since Covid. For many kids this was their first assembly ever! Evie and Abi did a great job presenting our presentation, especially with the technical difficulties we were having. All the children from Maunga and Maunga Iti presented during the assembly. It was great to see such confidence to stand up in front of the whole school.

Here is a video by Maunga Iti and their sock puppet germs giving us some hygiene tips. Keep an eye on our blog for other items that we shared.

How Maui Slowed Tamanui Te Ra.

At the end of the last term we created stories about How Maui slowed Tamanui Te Ra. We read books about this traditional story and also looked at simple versions that other students at our school had created in the past. A few of us wanted to publish our stories for the school library. James has turned his work into an Explain Everything to share at our assembly. 

 Enjoy.

Explain Everything Space Stories

Here are some examples of this week's publishing.  Instead of writing them out and putting them up on the wall, we decided to publish using Explain everything.  We are getting quicker at making our own avatars, and backgrounds.  We are also getting good at finding quiet spots to record our stories.  We hope you enjoy them!

Dimitiri

Peri

Jameswr

Duffy Theatre Term 2 2020

On Tuesday we were lucky to have a visit from the hilarious Duffy Theatre. Duffy had quite the adventure reading up on how to look after a Coggen! A Coggen is a mythical creature, part dog, part cat, and part chicken.

We learnt how reading can help us research information to help us with our daily lives. Over the holidays you may like to visit the local public library. Both Kaikohe and Kerikeri have a wonderful selection of books and it's free to join and borrow. A great wet day activity for the holidays!

Dr Sprocket Makes a Rocket

Here is a link to a couple of pieces of work children have created this week for Reading.  They are based around a shared book we have covered called Dr Sprocket makes a Rocket.  This was the basis of some of our Play, Make, Create that went alongside our reading.  This work was completed in Explain Everything which is a great creative learning tool but one we are only just getting use to using.  We hope you enjoy.

The first example is by James.  It is very exciting to see how he also included a poem on his last page where he is describing his own lego rocket construction.  This is fantastic as it shows how the different texts we are reading are helping us to feel engaged and learn about the topics we are covering in class.

Evie did a great job of clearly reading part of the story and explaining what her rocket creation is like.  Well done Evie!

Subira just did a great job all around with her explain everything as well.

Fixing the Space Shuttle

Today we have been astronauts fixing the space station. 

We had great fun taking off the back of an old television. It had so many screws to find and undo. We guessed what might be under there. We thought we would find wires, ants, or buttons. We found lots of interesting wires of different colours. We also found different shapes and textures. We are still exploring as more pieces can be unscrewed. 

Reilly, Harry, and Kaden are using screw drivers to see what they can fix. 

Maunga and Iti Space Stories

Team Maunga and Iti have been reading and learning all about Space.  We have also been busy creating different things to turn our classroom into a space place and we are finding it all very exciting.  Here are some stories we wrote after reading different books and looking at different videos about rockets and them lifting off into space.  We were trying to use interesting words to describe the parts of our rockets.  We hope you enjoy it.

Space Rocket Reading

Walking back into the classroom after morning tea to find this amazing group of children.  They are loving our classroom space focus and the half-made rocket and space area that we are setting up.  This has defiantly become a favorite place for children to read to themselves and others.  It is fantastic seeing them reading to each other quietly before school too.  

They are enjoying writing fantastic stories about space, and publishing these using Explain Everything - Watch this space for some of these!  They are also looking up different books we have in the class library, and reading books we have selected for them on sunshine classics about space too.  The space poems with QR codes that students can scan and practice reading if getting lots of use within our rocket reading space.  Our afternoon program is all based around creating things they are reading about so we can display them within this area.  They have lots of clever ideas on how to turn our whole class into space place!  It's fantastic to see all their creativity and enthusiasm.

3 Minute Frenzy Stars

This weeks 3 Minute Frenzy stars are for great improvement.  We are still working on making sure our letters are formed correctly and making sure they were the right way around.  It is great to Maunga trying their best to improve on the previous score.  Can't wait to see what we can get by the end of the term and by the end of the year!  Well done everyone, especially Hannah and Tommy this week.  Great work!

Pairs of Legs Maths with Whaea Diane

Today Whaea Diane came into our class again.  We got to complete activities based around pairs of legs.  We learned that pairs were groups of 2.  We talked about how we have a pair of legs and that means we have 2 legs.  We talked about how if there were 2 pairs of shoes then that would be 4 shoes... And LOTS of other things too.  

Then we worked on some animal pictures.  We had to answer 4 questions.  How many animals were there? How many pairs of legs were there? and How many legs were there altogether.  We didn't get to answer all of the questions but we did discover that we could group our cards in a way that would help us work out how many pairs of legs there were altogether.  

This made us realize how important the number 5 is and how learning not only to count to 5 and back from 5 but also our basic facts to 5 is so important.

Deano Yipadee our Virtual Author Experience

Today we had a virtual Author visit us via a direct link.  He sang us some of his favourite songs which he has made into books and we all had a great time singing and dancing along too.  He talks to us about how authors get their creative thoughts from everywhere especially the funny and sometimes silly things that happen around us.  

Here are some photos of us having fun listening to him reading and singing us his stories as well as us dancing and having fun.  We think reading and writing is MAGIC!  Lots of us want to be authors too.

PS:  We are still in Covid Level 2 restrictions at our school so we have to stay at our tables and keep in our own spaces.  But we still had lots of fun together.

3 Minute Frenzy

This week was the first week we have completed our 3-minute frenzy work in our books.  Subira did a fantastic job and got 19 words as her first attempt!  Well done.  Keep up the great work.  I wonder if you can get 20 next time?

Taking the learning home

This week we have been doing lots of work at school about COVID-19 and keeping ourselves safe from germs that are around us.  One of our Play, Make, Create activities was to create a germ using wool and pipe cleaners.  Peri create a very cute one and uploaded it to his seesaw account, and took the piece of art home with him.  A few days later I get a very cute photo back from his mum to show me the cake he had asked for, for his birthday.  

It wasn't a super hero cake or a truck or farm one...  

It was a replica of his Germ creation that he had taken home earlier in the week!

It is always fantastic to see and hear how learning that happens at school can be continued on at home and how excited and engaged children are in their learning!  Keep it up Peri!

10 colourful Squares/Monsters

Here is a movie to show the shared book that we created for maths about our shape monsters.  These are stories we created to share our knowledge about numbers.  We hope you enjoy.

We took pictures of our work and then put them into Explain Everything.  We then recorded ourselves reading our stories to share with everyone.

 

Maunga and Iti's Lock down message

Here is the message we all worked hard to create at the end of Lockdown.  We shared it at our whole school assembly that we had online towards the end level 3 before we returned to school.

Enjoy.

Maths movie for Farming maths.

Here is a movie that we took of children completing maths work.  Our class topic at the moment is all about farms and farming.  We hope you enjoy.

Stop motion creations to publishing our writing

This week we were very excited about our publishing.  We had written stories about events on a farm and then we created a stop motion to show this.  We then recorded over the top our stories and this was our publishing.  We had so much fun.  It was hard work but we really enjoyed this experience.

Andrew

Colin

Evie

Peri

Farm Scenes Using Stop Motion

Currently, we are doing a fantastic school kit called 'the farming kit'  So lots of our learning at the moment is all about farming and what it is like, the animals, who work on farms and why they are important.  

This week we had lots of fun working together to create small movies using the blocks, farm animals, and vehicles that Mrs G brought in.  

Some things we have been learning about when making Stop Motion movies

• You need to set your scene up, where it's not in the way (otherwise it gets broken by accident)
• You have to take LOTS of pictures
• Each picture is only slightly different from the last picture (MOVE IT JUST A LITTLE BIT).
• Your iPad needs to be set up so it doesn't fall over or get moved.

Here are some examples of what we have been doing to practice these skills.

Colin

Andrew Tyler & Quinn

Colin, MacKenzie & Peri

James & Dimitri

MacKenzie & Peri

Author Unknown

Sadie

Tommy & Hawaiki

MacKenzie 30 Nights reading

This week Mackenzie earned her 30 Nights Reading certificate. We're so proud of all the reading that is happening at home in Maunga Iti.

Keep up the great reading Mackenzie!

Charlee's Farm Stop Motion

Charlee has been learning to use the the farm set to create a stop motion. You need to remember to only use small movements for each shot. Charlee took over 20 photos to get 5 seconds of video. She is now showing others how to do it too. 

Harry 30 Nights Reading!

Way to go Harry! 

Harry has earned his 30 nights home reading certificate. We really appreciate the support from home with daily reading.

Nickleby the Magician

Today we had Nickleby the Magician come to visit Here are some of the great messages he had for us to think about as he did his magic.

Respect... do things to others that you would like them to do to you.

Be careful not to say things to others that are not going to help them. Think ... Is it true, is it kind, is it helpful!

It is so important that we follow through with what we say we will do. E.g. we can be relied on to do what we say.

Bullying is...is when someone keeps being mean to you. It is punching (physical) and also the things we say (verbal) as well.

Cyberbullying - it causes lots of damage because it is not so obvious.

Bullying is also exclusion e.g. when we don't let people do things.

Evie and Tyler get 100% in List 2

Well done Evie and Tyler for getting 100% on list 2.  You now have an extra list added to your ring of words.  Well done.  You also got to choose the colour for the list 3 words cards.  Onwards and upwards.  

Keep practicing your lists everyone and this can be you too.  Remember that you must get 100% on the whole list before you can move up to the next level, not just all your spelling words for the week.  So keep practicing reading and writing ALL your list words.  They are also super helpful when writing little stories at school and at home.

Hawaiki Roa - 30 Nights Home Reading!

Well done Hawaiki Roa! 

Hawaiki Roa is Maunga Iti's first learner to achieve 30 nights reading at home. Each night after you read and sign the reading log at the back of their learning journal they get a sticker to help them get to their reading goal. There will be a few more earning this soon with all the wonderful reading that is happening at home. Keep up the great work!