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.

Farewell Vigo

Sorry it has been so quiet on the blog front lately.

Here are some pictures of our shared lunch to farewell Vigo. We wish Vigo well starting school in Germany when he returns home and hope he enjoyed his New Zealand school experience.

Can you hear me?

We put some inventions on a timeline last Friday to get a better understanding of time. Then we sorted ways that people use water in the past (before people understood how to use electricity) and now with machines and appliances which use electricity.

Here is our timeline. Thanks to the people who investigated some things around the house and found out when they were first used by people.

Ryan found out about the telephone and he had a string phone that you could make in his 'Inventions' book. We made some today, we had a poem about ears and sound. We used the phones and we made a recording using garage band so we could see sound waves. It was lots of silly fun. Not everyone wanted to be recorded but we all had a chance and we all loved to listen to it play back.

Pizza and Chocolate Problems

We had the playdough out again today to learn about fractions. Room 2 was transformed into a Pizza and Chocolate Restauarant. We made Pizza and had to work out how to make sure it was cut so that two people would have fair shares- equal amounts. We talked about how the parts had to be the same if they were fractions.

This one is cut down the middle. It wasn't fair but it has some tasty toppings.

 

We decided we needed a way to check if the pieces were fair.

 Some people started to make lots of little bits and then share them out into groups.

 

William G had an idea to cut the pieces into strips and then pile them up.

Mrs Walker got some rulers and the measuring began. Some people realised that they could put the pieces on top of each other and see if they were the same. Mrs Walker said they were comparing the area of their peices.

 Thomas and William P wanted to write the fraction they had made. Thomas had 31 pieces so 1 piece was 1 out of 31. He wrote it on the board. William counted the chocolate pieces he had made his chocolate pieces were 1/24 of his block of chocolate. We talked about how numbers at the bottom of the fraction that were bigger actually were smaller fractions because there were more pieces so each piece had to be smaller. Our 1/2 pizzas started to look pretty big.

Rippa Rugby

Ginny visited last week and took us for Rippa Rugby skills. It was a lots of muddy fun. We had two sessions and enjoyed ripping tails of our velcro belts and scoring tries. Some people spent more time on their try scoring celebration dances than the try scoring itself. Thanks again Ginny, we've been playing the 'Shark' game you taught us in our own fitness and P.E times.

Pyjama Party

The pyjama party was so much fun. We danced around in our pyjamas and then wrote stories about being in our pyjamas at school- in our pyjamas. Here are some photos and stories of our pyjama antics. In all the hurry getting changed Oliver has lost his long sleeved icebreaker polypropylene top. If any of the boys took it home in their bag by mistake he and his mum would love to get it back. Room 2 is filling up their marble jar again so they will all be thinking about what they will do next.

 

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Pyjama Party

Our whole class had a pyjama party. I did a funny movement. We’re gonna get out of our pyjamas at lunchtime. We got in our PJs at morning tea. We danced and we danced.

Tyne

 

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Pyjama Party

We put our pyjamas on and we got to dance and sing to the songs. I hugged Andrew on the ‘I’m a Believer’ song. On ‘Mama Mia’ most of the girls went round in circles as we sang along to the music. Thomas had ‘Skylander’ pyjamas. 

William P

 

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Pyjama Party

I had a pyjama party. We brought our pyjamas to school.

Isabelle

 

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Pyjama Party

I didn’t have my pyjamas so I pretended my clothes were pyjamas.

William G

 

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Pyjama Party

I loved Tarrah and Leena and Angelique because I like the dancing and the singing. I love the pyjama party like a love heart.

Charlotte K

Ross Creek

We had a great day, thank you so much to all of the parent helpers for keeping us safe and walking all that way trying to keep track of groups of darting little bush-walkers.
We started the day off making our scroggin. On Thursday we did some market research and trialled all of the scroggin ingredients, we used tally marks to show our favourites. We were making nut free scroggin for people with nut allergies- you can't buy this at the supermarket so we are filling a gap in the market.

Lots of people liked the dried bananas, only 3 people liked the ginger and most of us ran for the drink bottles when they tried this one.

We planned our scroggin for the trip and made it in little bags for the walk. We have also started to design our packaging. You can see our finish product soon as we will be bringing our scroggin sample home.

Here are the slide shows of our fantastic walks to Ross Creek. Thank you again to the parent helpers who made this possible and such a great day. Look out for our Ross Creek inspired art.

Trip One



Trip Two

Maps and Orienteering

When we watched the video about Ross Creek and on our first visit lots of Room 2 children were interesting in the maps shown around Ross Creek. They had questions about the orienteering points we saw on our walk and topography especially how the maps showed hills and flat sections of Ross Creek using contour lines. We made our own maps, some people made Ross Creek and some people made their own dream recreation area. We learnt about compass points and keys on maps by looking at lots of other maps of other recreation areas. We are really good at understanding symbols and some children designed their own.

 

Then we wanted to have a go at orienteering, Mrs Walker taught us how to use the compasses, some of them were stuck but William G worked out that they had a lock at the side that released the needle. We cracked the code on the top court using our compasses.



When we were finished we had more questions about how the compass worked, what makes the needle go to the North. Our poem that week gave us some clues about our Earth being a magnet. We decided to explore magnets as a Reading Activity in the following week. All of this started from Fergus noticing different types of lines on our maps and Joe counting all of the orienteering pegs along the track at Ross Creek. What a question trail.