Hockey with Ginny

Ginny, our Sports Activator, was at school twice last week to teach us about hitting and striking using hockey sticks and tennis balls.

We learnt that the parts of the hockey stick are called the hook and the handle. We learnt how to hold the stick and how we should stand when we dribble the ball with a hockey stick.

We played a game of "Sneaking up on Grandma' to practice our stance and some other games to practice our dribbling.

Thanks Ginny.

Mondays in the Garden

Mr Hogg and Room 2 are gardening on Monday afternoons. Last Monday we planted some brassica seedling to use later in the year. This week we are planting broad beans. We will keep them in the classroom to start them off in some old paper coffee cups. We will be measuring our plants and seeing how long it takes for different vegetables to grow. We learnt about staggered planting when we looked at our small seedlings compared to the big brocolli already growing in the garden.

African Drumming

On Wednesday mornings, Mrs Fry has been teaching us about beat and rhythm using these amazing African drums.

Tuhi: feeding chickens and looking after his teeth

Look what Tuhi has been up to.

  

Tuhi and I went on the swing.
We fed the chooks.

 

How long did it take?

On Wednesday afternoon we complete different maths experiences and activities as a class. Usually, we have Maths in the morning but on Wednesday we have Music and Te Reo Māori so Maths has to wait until the afternoon.

This term we are focusing on time, using clocks, watches and our I-Pads to learn about analogue and digital time. Today we made estimations about how long it would take us to different tasks.

We ran around our class in a circle. Vigo and Joe were the fastest, they only took 6 seconds to run around our class. No one took longer than 8 seconds so we were all pretty speedy.

Then we made estimations about which would take longer. Running the width of the court or the length.

These people thought the length would take the longest.

These people thought the width.

Then we tested to see. Once we had our results many of us realised that the width was faster because it was a shorter distance.

This helped us later because our next estimation was how long would it take to make a tower out of multi-link cubes. The catch was that our challengers all had to make towers of different heights. As an unexpected challenge some of the cubes wouldn't fit together well. Poor Andrew had a really bad run trying to find cubes that would click together. Our estimations were correct, we guessed that Tyne would be the fastest because he only had to make a tower of 2, Andrew would take the longest with the highest tower and Vigo would be in the middle.

Tyne 6 seconds (2 cubes)
Vigo 19 seconds (5 cubes)

Andrew 2:24 (2 minutes and 24 seconds) with (7 cubes)














Then we used our I-Pads and timed each other writing our names. People with long names took longer than people with short names. We thought this would be the case but we checked lots of times- mostly because everyone likes timing each other on the I-Pads. Some people saw the international clocks on the I-Pad and had questions about these. We noticed that when the stopwatch on the board got to 59 seconds it flicked over and started again. We talked about how there are 60 seconds in 1 minute and this was why. Then we watched all the minutes flick over- nothing like watching time fly.

On the Maths page of our blog Mrs Walker has added the site we used today to time our block building. When we use other ones she will put them there.

Paper Helicopters

Charlotte K had the WOW Folder and today she taught us to make paper helicopters which work just like a sycamore seed.

She taught us how to cut the paper that her Dad helped her prepare and then pick a little bit of blutack on it to put some weight in the bottom.

We had lots of fun experimenting with them and working out how to get them to spin really well. It was a 'Health and Safety' nightmare but we kept safe following the rules. Some people used different throwing techniques, held the helicopters differently or used a throw and blow method. Two people made a game with points for different spins and how the helicopters landed.

It was really fun and really WOW, thanks to Charlotte and her Dad.

Tuhi Kiwi at Leena's House

For the rest of the year Room 2 will have a classroom kiwi which will have sleep-over weeks at the homes of different classmembers.

Last week Leena had Tuhi. She drew this picture of him at her house and wrote this story about his time with her by herself. Charlotte C has Tuhi this week.

I slept with Kiwi. He slept while I was playing with my friend.

  

by Leena

An Afternoon of Drama

This term we will be focussing on drama to express our learning about Ross Creek.
To begin this work we have watched a video about Ross Creek that Mrs Walker found on youtube. You can watch it on our theme page.

We had some time to practice acting out the different activities that people enjoy at Ross Creek. If we wanted to we could performed our activities back to the class. See if you can pick the activities we are performing; we had the most fun performing dog walking and mountain biking.

Mrs Walker was not surprised that Room 2 were extremely good actors and actresses, there were some very creative, inventive and confident performances. Vigo was a real favourite and had us in stitches during most of his acts- it really looked as if he was flying through Ross Creek on a mountain bike just like the video we watched.

Here Comes the Sun

 

Well not really, it is getting colder each day. At the end of the first term we designed and made some prototype sunglasses for our technology project. Our brief was to design glasses that were so cool kids would want to wear sunglasses and protect their eyes.

We talked about how some of our designs were really cool but a little heavy or hard to wear. In our market research people who wore sunglasses wanted light and comfortable glasses which didn't break easily.

We used lots of craft supplies to decorate our glasses and talked about how to safely use the glue gun. The adults helped us with the hot glue guns. Thank you to all of the parents who helped with the templates and hot glue gunning. It was a fun project for the end of the term.

     

Our finished prototypes look priceless.

Sycamore Seeds

In the holidays Mrs Walker found some sycamore seeds near her Grandma's house and collected them up for us.

We observed them carefully and had lots of fun throwing them around on the top court. Some people wanted to get a better spin by throwing them from the slopping path up to the school gate and some people thought it would be a challenge to try to throw them through the basketball hoop on the top court.

We wrote some stories about our experience with sycamore seeds. Here are a few examples; you can read more on our published writing frames in the classroom.
 

Sycamore Seed

The sycamore seeds whirled and twirled to the ground.

Isabelle

Sycamore Seed

The sycamore seeds were the colour of moth wings.

Amelie

 

Sycamore Seed

My seed was flying all day.

Joe

Sycamore Seed

I saw the sycamore seed in the sky.

Zadyn

Sycamore Seed

I love the sycamore seeds. They helicopter down to the ground.

Charlotte K

Sycamore Seed

I noticed the sycamore seeds are shaped like a fish when you put it down flat. The seed is bumpy. It was fun when it was going around. Then we wrote about the sycamore seed.

Leena