The Old Log of Wood

 

Sorry this isn't the best photo. We had a lovely (quick) visit with the log of wood. Mrs Walker had to give the best phototaking spot to the official photographer. We will have a copy of that photo soon. 

Squid

Room 2 have had an outrageous visitor in our class last week. We had a squid in our 'Topic/Science' area at Reading time in our class all week. We observed the squid carefully and made scientific drawings of the squid.

We learnt quite a lot about squid on Youtube. We watched these videos and on Friday we went up to the top court and measured out the giant squid that was found by a Japanese Science team. Mrs Walker drew the outline of a squid once we had measured out the length.




The squid was really big. Some people in Room 2 had apparently always wanted to see a squid eye. Well they got to have a really long look at one and one lucky person got to be a squid eye.

Tuhi has been busy

Tuhi has been visiting lots of people. Here are some pictures and stories about what he has been up to. Click on the comics to make them full screen.

Rolling the Dice

Last week we started testing dice in our class. We wanted to know which number gets rolled the most. We have been learning about the language around probability, possible and impossible, likely and unlike, certain and definate.
With our maths partners we rolled a dice and used tally marks to record how often we rolled each number.

William P thought 3 would be the most rolled because he always gets threes when he plays snakes and ladders.

Sophie thought 6 would get the most rolls because it was on the dice. Lots of people agreed that 6 comes up a lot.

 

We had eleven different groups all testing the dice and different numbers were the winners for different groups. We talked about why...

Oliver said that he wanted four to win and sort of could roll it so four came up a lot. He liked trying to do it but he also said it is kind of cheating. Lots of groups agreed that they could make the dice land on a number sometimes but they couldn't every time. We all decided it wasn't a fair test to try to make the dice land on numbers but it was fun. 

We talked about chance. There was no chance of rolling numbers that were not on the dice. There are six numbers on the dice and you could roll any of those six numbers. We talked about 1 in 6 chance of rolling your favourite number. That each number has the same chance because there is one of each. William and Andrew said it was like fractions, you have 1/6 of a chance. In probability we say you have 1 in 6 chance of rolling each number on the dice.

 This week we changed the dice. Mrs Walker changed the 6 on our big classroom dice to a 1. We predicted that we would not roll any 6s. We were right.

We thought 1 would win because it had more chance but we kept rolling 4s. Oliver discovered that the dice had a funny corner and we noticed that it kept rolling to a four because of this. It was great to learn about fair testing but sort of ruined the point of Mrs Walker probability lesson. Next week we will change 4 to a 1 as well and see what happens.



It was great to hear about all the happy coin tossing completed at home last week. Next week we will change the odds and use two coins.

Mrs Walker Gets a Break

There have been a lot of children enjoying playing school before school starts. I'm not really sure if they have me quite right when they act out the teacher but some people wanted to have a real go on the teacher's chair.

Chartlotte C spent lots of time preparing a book to read to the class last term and lots of people have done the same and had a go since. William P taught us all how to make some Geogami. Zadyn is reading to us everyday to share his new learning from Reading Recovery with us.

It is lovely to have a class who want to share their enthusiasm for learning with their friends. Keep it up Room 2.

Bird Art

It has taken a while but our 'Bird Art' based on our walks to Ross Creek last term is finally hanging in our classroom.

We collected lots of natural objects, mostly leaves and moss, to create our bird bodies using PVA glue and some coloured paper pieces. We tried to lay our collage pieces in the same direction as we observed birds feathers to be when we sketched different birds we saw on our walks.

We used some coloured feathers, plastic eyes and some images of bird feet. We learnt about how different birds have different feet for different ways they use them. We used bird feet designed for gripping to tree branches.

Then we made the backgrounds for our birds. We made it a blurred bush a bit like some of our Ross Creek photos. One of the green paints smelt very strongly of eggs, you will see some talented one-handed painting. This left us free to hold our nose with the other hand.

Luckily it didn't smell once it had dried. You can view our finished work in our classroom.