Thursday, March 30, 2017

Tommy's Robot

This week the Seals reading group read a story called "Tommy's Robot".  Today they went to Pounamu Atawhai to 'drive' a robot and learn a little about how they are programmed.









The Annoying Robber by Benji R


“Im bored” said the white fluffy hairy cat. So he ran down the sunny street and suddenly a red and black robber came.  


“Hah hah hah” said the scary robber.  The cat quickly ran away.  

After two hours the scary robber caught the quick cat.  “No” he said”  Suddenly he escaped out of hs ugly hands.  “Think your cool?” said the amazing cat.  He better stop robbing.

ADAM'S HEDGEHOG SLIDESHOW

Wednesday, March 29, 2017

WEEK 9'S TOP TEN!

PLACE VALUE!

Next week we will be starting to learn about Place Value.  It is essential that we all INSTANTLY recognise patterns up to ten.  This is called Subitizing.  
Here are a couple of videos that would help us practise this at home.







Another thing that is great for us to do is play board games with you that use dice. 
This involves us recognising the dice patterns and with two dice we have to do a bit of adding as well!

Monday, March 27, 2017

MEASUREMENT SORT

Today we had a new activity based on measurement.  

The teachers gave us some cards with measurement words on them like tiny, large and big.

Our job was to discuss what the words mean and put them in order from the word that means the smallest to the word that means the largest.




Smart Moves

We had a fabulous morning out at Smart Movies today.  Take a look at how clever Regan, Benji and Sofya are.








POETRY COMPETITION WINNERS!

Congratulations to Mia, Emily, Karys and Joshua!

They all won prizes in the School Poetry Competition!

Here they are receiving their prizes from Mrs Kenyon.  You can see their winning entries in the Library at School.

Well done kids!





DINOSAUR - HOW BIG ARE YOU?

http://pbskids.org/dinosaurtrain/games/howbigareyou.html
Click the above link for a cool game that you can play at home!

Sunday, March 26, 2017

DINOSAURS!!!

We had an absolute blast this afternoon!

Our Inquiry topic for this week is DINOSAURS with a strong focus on Measurement.  


Mia and Charlotte-Rose were busy writing down some dinosaur facts


The girls were busy learning to use rulers to measure the heights of the dinosaurs


Outside some of the boys were busy measuring out how long the dinosaurs were.

They were HUGE!



These kids are classifying dinosaurs


Some of us got CREATIVE and made dinosaur hats


Joshua and Anushka drew a dinosaur and then measure how high they were using non-standard measurements



Kyle made a spiky dinosaur tail


Look out!  It's Tyrannosaurus Ben!


Here is Soyfa with her dinosaur hat


 Mrs Lunn cut out a footprint the same size as a dinoaur's foot.  
Did you know it is the same size as Mika?


Then we had to fill up the dinosaurs footprint with objects - it too 13 looking word cards to equal 1 footprint!



Here's Anushka's dinosaur.  It is 8 blocks high.

We can't wait until tomorrow for more Dinosaur Maths!


LEARNING TO USE AN INDEX

Today Adam brought his Animal Encyclopedia to school.  Mrs Lunn showed some of us how to use the index in the back of the book to quickly find out what page our favourite animals were on.  We are experts at using an index now.  Adam noticed that using an index is a bit of Maths and Literacy - great connections being made there Adam.  Well done!





Tuesday, March 21, 2017

DOUBLES!

In Maths we need to know our doubles and halves of numbers.  Please can you help us practise knowing our doubles at home.

Here's a couple of songs to help...






World Poetry Day 2017

Monday, March 20, 2017

READY, SET, GO!

Today was Race Day!

Each group got to race their car down their ramp.  Mrs Kenyon timed the cars going down the ramp and Mrs Ruawai measured how far they went.

Here are a few photos of us in action...

So far Emily and Mia are winning!

         

  

First Steps Visitors

Today we were lucky enough to have Charlotte's sister Kate come and visit us with her Daycare friends.  Little did we know, Caitlin's Aunt Jen was with them as she works at First Steps.  We were so pleased to have them join us for the afternoon.

"One day I waited all day for my sister Kate to come to see me in my classroom.  When we had just started to finish our ramps for Lightning McQueen she came and helped us".  By Charlotte

 

MATHS - PIAKO RUA STYLE!

We LOVE Maths!

From Mondays through to Thursday we do Maths first thing in the morning.  We have three rotations so we see each teacher, each day.

We do a strategy workshop with Mrs Ruawai in Wonderland.  We are learning subtraction for the rest of the term.  In the Rainbow Room we do knowledge workshops with Mrs Kenyon.  We are focusing on backwards counting as this ties in with our subtraction work.  With Mrs Lunn in the Jungle, we do Top Ten and at the moment we are focusing on fractions.



Look at these lovely kids busy learning.  
 Well done guys.

If you would like help at home you could get us to practise counting backwards or saying the number BEFORE a given number.

You could also use fractions when talking to us ....
"Would you like your apple cut in half or in quarters?"



CONGRATULATIONS CANDYLANDERS

Congratulations to the first of our Candylanders!

Well done to Petra, Maarire and Ella.

We are SOOOO proud of you.





Sunday, March 19, 2017

MAKING RAMPS!

 We are up to making our ramps for Lightning McQueen.  We needed to draw a plan first and work out what we needed.  Then it was the fun stuff - making them!  Hooray!












Wednesday, March 15, 2017

LOOK WHAT WAS IN THE SKY THIS MORNING!


Piako Rua had a beautiful rainbow shining over us this morning.  
We guess that makes us the treasure at the end of the rainbow!

THE INVESTIGATION CONTINUES...

Today we continued EXPLORING into how to build our ramps.  We looked at the different surfaces we could put on our ramp to make the cars go faster.  There was some very clever thinking happening today.


Caitlin, Darcy, Karys and Ava-Rose came up with a great way to test the different fabrics.  They lay the fabrics over there legs to simulate a ramp and let the car go down.  They could tell by how fast the car traveled down, as to which material they could use on their ramp for Lightning.




Kyle did some great work today too.  He found out that two metre rulers would be 2 metres.  That's the distance that Lightning needs to go.  So he used two rulers to measure the distance and then he started building his ramp.   When the teachers reminded him of the success criteria, that the car needs to go 2 metres from the END of the ramp, Kyle needed to do a re-think.  He decided to move his ramp and rulers down to the floor where he would have more room.  He moved the rulers to the end of his ramp.  Great thinking Kyle!


Now here's some clever thinking...

Benji, Regan and Nathan decided to use the sandpaper to sand down their piece of wood to make it really smooth.  Then they even thought to wipe the dust off with a cloth.   The smooth surface will decrease the amount of friction and allow the car accelerate faster.  How's that for flash thinking!



Devon and Kiara were busy making their ramp today too.  They decided to make it like a bridge.  They noticed that when the car went down the wood, it didn't go down very fast.  The wood was too bumpy and caused the car to slow down and even fall off the edge of the ramp!  So after a quick think, the kids grabbed a piece of cardboard that was nice and smooth to add onto their ramp.
Great problem-solving guys!



During this EXPLORE phase of our investigation, the children were encouraged to keep notes on what they found out.  Here are Ashton and Connor explaining what they have learnt so far...



Maarire and Petra work so well together.  You'll see in this video that although they don't say much there is a lot of thinking and problem-solving going on!



Ben found out about friction today - here is a video of him explaining what he found out.  
(excuse the background noise - it was pack up time!)