Thank you Leena

Leena has been working away in her own time, thinking about how she could help other people. She organised and donated a gift basket to CanTeen and has recieved a thank you card from CanTeen for her kindness.

Leena shared this with us today. We are so proud and grateful to have such a special and caring person in our class. What a lovely difference to make in the world Leena.

Using Perspective

We have been talking about perspective, both how other people see things differently and using perspective to take really cool photos.

Here are some photos of Room 9 taking photos that use perspective to make some things look big or small rather than close up of far away.

And here are the photos we took...

Zooming In

We have been looking at lots of books which zoom in and out, using point of view to create amazing images.

We made our own in co-operative groups using small objects on top of National Geographic magazines. Here are some of the best and funniest.

Treaty Signing

All of the junior classes meet outside Room 3 to sign our class treaties. We have been talking about the Treaty of Waitangi and about how different people interpret things that are written down. This connects with our learning focus on looking closely and thinking about perspectives.

We wrote our class treaty with positive ways to be at all times not just in our classroom. We looked at lots of pictures of us working so far in Room 9 and everyone agreed that we are doing a great job so far of living our treaty everyday. Our treaty was signed with our fingerprints and initials (because everyone loves playing with these at the moment). Maita is 'M and M' like the lollies, which everyone thinks is the best.

Our treaty is hanging up in our classroom next to the pictures of us 'Loving Learning as Active Achievers at Maori Hill School'.

It reads:

Everyone should be included.
Be compassionate and kind to everyone.
Forgive and be generous.
Show gratitude by looking after our school and classroom things.
Remember, all day, everyday, we are here to learn.

Cricket

We have enjoyed two sessions on cricket skills this term.

 We held the ball with our fingers in the rabbit ears position.

In this game we had to try to hit the wickets, each time we did one wicket was removed. The first group to get rid of all the wickets were the winners.

Tapa Cloth

We have a big tapa cloth in our room. We read a legend from Niue about a lady who rode inside a whale to Tonga and she was well know for being a great tapa artist. The legend described the process of making tapa. William shared some videos of this process and Carolena bought along lots of information and pictures of tapa art from the Pacific. Tinaania made lots of connections between the fibre art forms she practices at home. We talked about crushing the fibres and wetting and drying them to soften them up and bind them to one another.

We made our own art inspired by the process. First we made patterns which we felt represented what we connected with in the story. Lots of people included whales and fish.

Then we had lots of fun, we scrunched our paper, some people jumped on their paper and broke the fibres until it was more like a fabric.

The Respiratory System

Harold has again visited Maori Hill School. This year we learnt about the Respiratory System, our heart and lungs mostly and the breathing cycle of oxygen and carbon dioxide.

After Harold's visit we worked with our thinking buddy to represent our learning using some objects in our classroom. Here are some of our own respiratory and circulatory systems reinterpreted. Some were even working models.

Oh Rubbish

Our next statistical investigation was one close to Mr Hogg's heart. Mr Hogg told us about a problem he has with gladwrap around the school. It often blocks the drains up and we have to get plumbers in to find the blockage. It is an expensive problem.

We decided to help Mr Hogg with our mathematical skills. First we put on gloves and got the school rubbish nippers (may not be what they are called). William even had a mask on.

We went around the school and picked up rubbish- even from the garden beds (which we are not usually allowed on but Mr Hogg let us).

Then we sorted all of the rubbish and counted up how many pieces were in each of the categories we had made.

The most rubbish came from wrappers, the second biggest group of rubbish was gladwrap. Maita noticed that most of the rubbish was from lunchboxes. We gave our information to Mr Hogg and we will be working on developing some solutions for him towards the end of the term.

First Post of 2015

It has taken me longer than I thought to get around to uploading all of the things we want to share with you from Room 9 but here is 'the best of collection' from Term 1 so far.

Our learning focus this term centres around learning to look closely and notice patterns, similarities and differences and to ask questions or wonder about the things that we notice. We have investigated the power of observation through a statistical investigation into looking closely.

We wondered if looking closely would help us notice more. We had to try to identify our own eye, mouth and hand in a line up of photos of all of the eyes, mouths and hands in the class. We presented our data on how many people were right or not on tally charts and as pictographs.

Then we made careful observations of our eyes, mouth and hands and wrote about these in our learning journals.

Then we tried to identify our own body parts again. Did we improve- yes. So we think we can say that for our class, looking carefully does make us notice more.