Saturday 27 May 2017

Week 5

SMILE! It's time for our school photos on Monday morning. Please ensure you are wearing correct uniform and having a good hair day! 

This week we are learning about dissolving as a permanent change and starting to think about what we would like to investigate for our personal inquiries around change. 

In writing we are continuing on with our own nonfiction books. We are learning about fun fact pages, different kinds of pages and how-to pages this week. 

In Reading, we are learning more about the comprehension strategy of questioning.We will be learning more about how to make and read contractions like; I'm, don't, can't etc

In strand maths we are moving on from area to learning about weight. They will be comparing objects by weight and using non standard units (like blocks, books, any everyday object). 
Our math strategies work is going to be around the skills need to begin understanding multiplication.  This unit explores early multiplication where students are encouraged to skip count to solve story problems, rather than counting all.  For example "John has 3 ponds and there are 2 fish in each pond.  How many fish are there altogether?"  Students will be encouraged to solve this problem by going 2, 4, 6.  "There are 6 fish altogether." We will not be rote learning our multiplication facts as part of this unit. 

For Your Diary:
No Assembly Friday 
Social Event Thursday 22 June MBG 




Mufti Day Highlights

Highlights from our Mufti Day: 









Wednesday 24 May 2017

Learning Celebration

Thank you so much for attending our Learning Celebration yesterday and making it such a rich and exciting experience for the children. They were absolutely buzzing about it this morning!
Here are some photos from the celebration:

























Saturday 20 May 2017

Week 4

It's Learning Celebration Time! The children are very excited to share their learning with you this Wednesday afternoon/evening. They will be practising hard on Monday and Tuesday, and sharing with our friends in Mrs S's class on Tuesday in preparation. We hope you enjoy your time in our classroom!

Inquiry:
After Humpty's tragic accident last week, the children predicted whether Humpty could be put back together again.



Because most people thought the change was temporary they have made a plan to try to put Humpty together again. They decided to try taping him together... that ended in a sticky mess. This week they plan to beat Humpty, freeze Humpty, heat Humpty and boil Humpty. Sounds like it is going to be a hard week for Humpty!
We will also be looking at dissolving later in the week. Stay tuned for some more great thinking and predicting.

Writing:
We are continuing with our Nonfiction chapter books this week. We have written our introduction and a chapter for Habitat, Diet and this week Body and Predators. Their books are looking amazing! Feel free to take a sneaky peek at your Learning Celebration.

Reading:
The children are making great progress with their reading. Thank you for all the patient listening and supporting you do at home with their readers.  We have a class full of little readers who are engaged and working hard during reading time! This week is our last week focusing on retelling.

Maths:
Our inquiry into Place value has been creating quite the buzz. The children are getting skilful at counting our base ten blocks by ones and tens. They are eager to try out hundreds even and when someone pulls it off successfully there is an eruption of cheering from the class! Keep practising counting by 10's on those long car journeys. It is paying off!

PE : More throwing and catching this week.

Te Reo: He tino pai - Very good

This Week:

Wednesday May 24 Learning Celebration 

On Friday May 26 we will have a mufti day to raise funds for the Westpac Rescue Helicopter annual appeal. Dress in mufti - wear a wig or facial hair - Please bring along a gold coin donation to support this much needed service.

See you all on Wednesday! 





Sunday 14 May 2017

Week 3

This week we will be preparing for our Learning Celebration. This will involve the children selecting and reflecting on pieces of their work, learning how to share their ideas with others, and talk about their next learning steps. They are very excited to have you visit our classroom and get a glimpse into their school day. As it is their first time doing this kind of sharing, a lot of rehearsal and role playing will take place in preparation. For this reason, our reading programme may be altered later in the week to allow time for this to take place. Your child may bring home a book they have read previously as their own pick-box choice rather than a new book.  Remember to sign up for a time if you haven't done so already- details of how to do this can be found in this week's newsletter.

In Writing this week, the children continue to learn about non-fiction books and are hard at work creating their own amazing book WITH CHAPTERS! This week they are learning that all the information in a nonfiction book must be true and using scientific words is important.

In Reading, the children continue to work on giving a detailed retell at the end of their story, including information about the characters, setting, problem, solution and putting the events in sequential order.

In Maths, the children continue to explore Place Value. They will play games involving making and counting tens and ones. If you are lucky, they may just teach you one of the games when you visit! This will lead on to the addition strategy of partitioning numbers in to their tens and ones to add two digit numbers together. For now, we are just getting a lot of practise counting by tens and adding on the ones to form 2 digit numbers.

We are now into the Finding Out stage of our Inquiry into Change. The children have had lots of opportunities to play around with creating a chemical change, now it is time to start delving in to  WHY change happens. We will be learning as much as we can about the science behind chemical change. On Thursday and Friday last week, we learned a lot about States of Matter. After reading and watching clips about Matter, we played a molecule game where they children moved around the room like molecules. When I called out 'Solid'  the children huddled together as closely as they could,  "Liquid'  made the children spread out a little and flow around the room together, changing the shape of their group to flow between solid objects like tables. "Gas' made the children float aimlessly around the room staying far apart from each other. It was a fun way to understand the 3 States of Matter. This week we are going to be thinking about permanent and temporary changes. We will learn what these words mean and explore the idea of these kind of changes through more experiments involving dissolving, heating and freezing. Towards the end of the week Humpty Dumpty may make an appearance, tragedy may befall him and they children will be asked to investigate- Can Humpty be put back together again?

P.E. involves a lot of throwing and catching skills and drills for the next three weeks and will add on to the skills we have been working on when moving with a ball. 

This week: 
Byron Jenkins joins our class for the week for his first teaching practicum. Welcome Byron!

Monday- Library 
Thursday- Bring your bike 
Friday - Learn the Poi with Mrs Palmer for anyone interested 9.15-10.45 am outside the office.

Have a great week everyone!





Sunday 7 May 2017

Term 2, Week 2

Our Term started with a BANG last weeks with our little scientists tuning in to the world of chemical change and states of matter through a series of experiments. Ask your child about our fizzing rocks or dancing raisins!  Stay tunes for some photos and videos of our experiments later in the week. We will continue exploring and wondering early on this week and will move into our Finding Out stage towards the end of the week. As part of Finding Out, we will learn about the different States of Matter- Solids, Liquids and Gases. Expect some big questions at home! 




In Writing, we continue to explore the genre of Nonfiction books. Last week, the children acted as detectives, trawling through piles of nonfiction books to discover important parts/features of nonfiction texts. The children selected a topic they considered themselves to be experts on and this became the topic for their first nonfiction text. They created their cover and did some note-taking from their prior knowledge and from their research in books from our amazing school library. This week they will learn how to group their information, make a labeled diagram and learn what a caption is.

In Reading, we continue to practise finding and reading 'Just Right' books. We are also going to be brushing up on our retelling skills, so spending a little extra time retelling the story after reading it at home wold be very helpful in reinforcing this skill.

In Maths, we continue with our exploration of Place Value.  Being able to skip count by 10's to 100 is essential to success with Place Value, so we are doing a lot of practise in this area in class. The children will be using beads on pipe cleaners this week to make groups of ten and then adding the groups of tens together with any ones to make a two digit number.

Te Reo- We are learning to ask how our friends are using - Kei te pÄ“hea koe ___?



This Week:
Monday- Library 
Tuesday - Jo on Release- Hannah in  M1. Weather permitting, We will also have a Tsunami Drill. 

Reminder:  Wednesday 24 May is our Learning Celebration. School finishes at 12:30pm that day.  
To book a time slot: 
The children will be preparing over the coming weeks and are very excited to let you see school through their eyes. If you are unable to make it, please let me know as soon as possible. For more information click here 

Have a wonderful week! 

Warmest Regards,
Jo Kember




Tuesday 2 May 2017

An Introduction to Place Value

This Term, we are going to be developing our understanding of numbers by learning more about place value.  Understanding how numbers are made up of tens and ones helps children to be able to add numbers more efficiently.  Today the children participated in an immersion activity to get them thinking about the most efficient way to count big numbers. Divided into small groups, the children were given an huge pile of materials and only given the instructions to:
a) work as a team
b) count all the items at their station quickly
c) count as carefully as they could and all agree how many objects there were in the pile

Then we stood back and watched how the groups approached the task. Interestingly they all had the same approach as you will see-


Hmmm... a lot of enthusiastic counting going on, but not much team work and a lot of counting by ones which is problematic with so many items to count! So Marissa and I waited and after some time, something started to change with our groups....


Now to get a more efficient strategy. Suddenly totals started to be called out from different groups. When asked to prove their answer to the group, the children realised that that would involve recounting the entire groups by ones!  Back to the drawing board! Then Isla has the seed of an idea and it starts spreading...




Monday 1 May 2017

Patterns Patterns Everywhere!

We already know a lot about patterns! In our first Strand lesson of the term we got to show off our skills of creating patterns using equipment of our choice.