Christmas is on it's way!

Please join us at school this Monday night 6pm - 7.30pm for an end of year/Christmas get together.

BYO picnic or buy a sausage from the PFA barbeque.

Music will be playing and there will be an appearance by the school band.







Please remember to bring in your costumes for our Christmas show this week. We will be performing on Tuesday at 9.30am and on Wednesday at 2pm.





On Thursday and Friday this week Ms Grech (one of our Year 5/6 teachers) will be taking T4 while I go to the Year 6 camp. The children have been doing lots of buddy work with Ms Grech's class over the year, they know her well and are looking forward to a fun couple of days with her.

We're going to the zoo, zoo, zoo...

This Thursday we are heading to Auckland Zoo to learn about endangered species and what we can do to help protect their environments to help them survive.

We will be boarding the buses soon after the bell so please make sure you are on time for school that day.

So far the weather forecast is for scattered showers so will go ahead but please pack a raincoat. We will keep an eye on the forecast and update you closer to the time if needed.

HATS HATS HATS

Please remember to bring your school uniform bucket hat everyday from this week. If you do not have a school hat they are available to purchase from the school office.

Term 3 Week 9

Welcome to Jake who has started in our class today. It is nice to have you as part of our class.

Mufti Day - This Friday we will be having a mufti day to support the Salvation Army. Please bring an item of tinned food to contribute.

Cultural and Arts show

You should have received a notice regarding the show on Friday. Please fill in the permission slip and return to me as soon as possible. Please let me know also if your child is unable to attend.

There will be two shows - one during school time and another in the evening. School will finish at normal time on this day and children who are performing in the night show will need to be back at 6pm. The show runs for approximately 2 hours.

During the show the children will be in classrooms and will only go to the hall to perform their item. Those in Peaches and Pickles classes may also be performing in these groups (please check with P&P if you are unsure).

I understand that this a late night for young children so it is absolutely fine if they are only able to do the day time show, please just let me know.

If your child is coming for the evening show I would suggest packing some food and drink for them to snack on while waiting to perform.

Please check the school newsletter for ticket sale information.

MOTAT

We had a fantastic day at MOTAT yesterday. Thanks so much to our wonderful parent helpers, we couldn't do trips like this without your support. The children had a great time and were buzzing about it this morning. They couldn't wait to tell Ailsa all about it and have been talking her ear off this morning!

Week 6

Cross Country

Well done to all the children for completing the cross country run on Thursday. Our training certainly paid off with everyone crossing the finish line with a big smile on their face. The ice block at the end was definitely well deserved.

MOTAT

Our trip to Motat is fast approaching. Please get your forms in asap. 

Writing 

Our major focus for the rest of the term is going to be on our writing. We are learning to tune into our senses in order to include lots of details in our narratives. We are challenging ourselves to write longer stories each day. 

Spelling

To assist us to write quickly we are learning to spell the words on the essential spelling lists. These are words we need to write often so it helps to be able to spell them automatically. We will have a variety of activities in class to practice these but if you would like to start learning them at home please see me for a list.

Wigs

Do you have a colourful wig at home? We will need lots of colourful wigs as part of our costumes for our item at the cultural evening. Please hunt them out and bring them in if you have them. (no need to buy anything special - we will get creative if need be)

Parent meetings 

On Wednesday this week we will be holding two meetings for parents to present the results of the recent school organisation survey.

Meetings will be at 1.45pm and 7.00pm

Week 5

MOTAT Trip

Please remember to get your permission slip in as soon as possible. We are looking forward to looking at the different ways people lived and the transport they used in years gone by

Inquiry

We are continuing with our inquiry on movement and are really enjoying our airport and boat role-play areas.

Cross Country

We have been practicing hard and are getting really fit. Come and see us show off our running skill at Edith Hopper park on Thursday afternoon.

Week 3 Term 3

Inquiry Launch

Sadly we couldn't go on our beach walk today as the weather was not kind to us but When Mr Stilwell and Mr Winter went to see if the beach was ok for us they found something really interesting! They decided to bring all the items back for us to investigate...

It appeared there had been a shipwreck and some luggage had been left behind on the beach. We unpacked each of the 4 bags and thought about who they may have belonged to, where they had come from and why they may have left.

When we got back to class we made a pirate ship out of all the bits and pieces, it was great fun!

In the afternoon we had a visit from a Dan Godoy, Marine Scientist who showed us lots of amazing photos and told us all about the work he does to help marine animals especially sea turtles. We learned about why it is so important to try to reduce our plastic usage and make sure we put our rubbish in the bin so it doesn't find its way out to sea.

Maths

In maths we have been learning about fractions. Identfying halves and quarters of shapes and reading the symbols for these. This week we will continue with this and will learn to find half of a set by sharing objects equally.

Writing

We have had lots of great inspiration for writing from our inquiry provocation so look out for some great stories in our books this week.

Week 1 Term 3

Welcome back to term three. I hope you all had a fantastic break. It was lovely to see all the happy smiley faces of T4 this morning!

We are now half way through our year and it is really exciting to look back and see the amazing progress that each and every one of the students have made.

On Tuesday we will be celebrating 100 days at school. Stayed tuned for photos of the the activities we will do to mark this occasion.

Our inquiry this term will be based on the concept of movement. We will be looking into how and why people move from place to place around the world.

Week 8

It is hard to believe that in 3 weeks time most of us will have completed half a year at school! As I am in the midst of writing reports at the moment I am reflecting on the progress made this year and it is exciting to see how far each and every one of us has come. It is great to see the children really thinking about their learning goals and how motivated they are to reach them.

This week we are learning about taking ownership. We are thinking about what we need to do to get ourselves ready for school, how we can help our grown-ups at home especially in the mornings and how we can better look after our belongings and learning environment at school.

To help us build up our writing stamina and high frequency word banks we have started Word Power. We have 5 minutes to write as many words as we can before the timer goes off! This week's Word Power champ was Indy-Rose with 23 words - Well done!! Each week we will challenge ourselves to beat our previous score. This could be a fun thing to challenge your family to at home.

A good way to get the word count up is to think about rhyming words (if we can write 'at' we can write cat, hat, mat, sat...) and adding ing, s, or ed to words (look - looks - looking - looked)

Week 7

This week as part of our social coaching we are talking about the difference between reporting important issues and telling tales. We are learning to find ways to solve minor disputes and problems together.

In reading we are looking at speech marks, question marks and exclamation marks and practicing changing our voice when we read these to make it sound like someone is talking or asking a question.

In maths we are learning to solve addition problems by holding the largest number in our head and counting on.

In writing we are working on writing at least two sentences, making sure we have a capital letter at the start and a fullstop at the end of each.

Here are some photos of our bread making experience last week. We really enjoyed the bread and are writing stories about it this week.

Term 2 Week 6

I hope everyone had a great Queen's Birthday weekend.

Reading
It has been great to see the progress the children are making in reading. On Thursday and Friday last week I completed assessments of all the children in reading and have re-grouped everyone. Please remember to keep practicing those sight words and make sure that known words are read fluently when they appear in the reading books - No robot voices!

Maths
This week we are learning about addition and subtraction basic facts to and with 5
Try this song out at home:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwkMHrhzeKc


Inquiry
We had lots of fun erupting our volcanoes on Friday using baking soda, vinegar and some red colouring for effect. We were hoping to be able to take our volcanoes home at the end of the day but made an interesting discovery when we picked them up off the plate - The baking soda and vinegar had begun eating into the clay and we had a big muddy mess!!

Term 2 Week 5

Thank you to all the Parents and Grandparents who came to celebrate our learning with us. The children were very proud of their achievements and really enjoyed sharing what they get up to during the day at school.

In writing this week we are focusing on:
* leaving spaces between our words
* s-t-r-e-t-c-h-i-n-g out our words and writing down the sounds we can hear
* making sure our short letters are short and our tall letters are tall

This week in maths we will be continuing to work on our number knowledge and practicing writing numbers correctly. We will also be talking about the concepts of 'heavier than' and 'lighter than'

Inquiry - Our alkaline/acid experiment with the cabbage water went well. We loved sharing this with you and used up the last of it today making lots of different shades of pink and blue. Our clay volcanoes are finally dry so this week we will be painting them before using them to test fizzing and foaming reactions.

Reminders:
 * With the changeable weather we are experiencing at the moment we seem to be accumulating jumpers and raincoats. Please make sure these items are clearly named so we can reunite them with their owners.
* Poem books - Please help your child remember to pack their poem book to return to school each Monday
* Library books - Our library day is Thursday. Please ensure your child brings their book back each week so they are able to choose a new one to bring home.

Term 2 Week 4

For the first half of this week we will be busy preparing for our celebration of learning. We are looking forward to sharing some of the things we do at school and our current learning goals. Please remember school finishes at 12.30pm tomorrow.

Inquiry
On Friday we found out what happens when we make butter without salt. It didn't become slime or poisonous like we thought it might, it just tasted different. Most of us liked the butter without salt the best. This week we are making volcanoes and finding out how popcorn pops.

We have also been finding out about states of matter and can tell you all about solids, liquids and gases

Here is the butter we made. It turned out really well and our arm muscles got a good workout with all the shaking.

Term 2 Week 3

Inquiry

We had great fun last week with our inquiry launch and really enjoyed the opportunity to work with the other teachers in our team.

We watched Coke and Mentos react to make a spectacular geyser

Miss Bell showed us how to make delicious butter

 Mrs Gilmour made gooey slime

 Mrs Stilwell showed us what happens when you heat up crayons

 Mr Collins made some cool fizzing and foaming potions

 Ms Grech helped us make some crazy oobleck

Now that the "Tuning In" faze of our inquiry is finished we are moving into "Finding Out." We have decided that the experiment most of us would like to know more about first is Making Butter.

We have listed some questions and wonderings we have and will begin investigating the answers this week.

Some of our questions are:

Why did we add salt?

What is the runny stuff left over?

How is icecream made?

Can we make butter with milk?

Learning Celebrations

The children are continuing to prepare for our celebration of learning day/evening next week. Remember to follow the link from last week's blog to book a time.