Swimming

With lots of "brrr"s and excited chattering Room 10 went for their first swim on Tuesday. Here we are have a lot of fun showing off our swimming skills:

Kowhai Production

All the children in Kowhai have been very excited about their production this week. We have been involved with 3 mini musicals making up the production. Our room and Room 12A have learned to perform "Tadpole Rag"; Room 11 and Renwick 3 have learned to perform "Caterpillar Boogie"; and Room 12 and Renwick 2 have learned to perform "Hooray for the Little Red Hen!" With great encouragement to sing with good volume and super actions the children enjoyed their first performance for family and friends yesterday at the School of Music. If you were not able to make it yesterday, make sure you are there today for a fun afternoon!

Choosing

Each week I have a hard time choosing what to put on our class blog! We are so busy learning and the weeks seem to whizz by in a wonderful hum of activity. I hope those of you who visit our blog enjoy the snippets I choose to post.

This week in Maths we have been learning about 2D shapes. The children have spent each day investigating a different 2D shape. Here are some of the activities we did to investigate triangles:





In art we recycled some newspaper to make our own paper using a paper making kit. We made green paper and added some glitter to it for a sparkly effect. The best part was the stamping to drain the water!




As a class we decided to share the writing of a class story. Our story is called "The Room 10 Mystery". We had such fun sharing ideas and sequencing the events. To celebrate our story we read it to the Kowhai syndicate in assembly on Friday. The shark bit went down extremely well!!

Term 4 Week 3

This week we welcomed Cooper and James to Room 10. It is great having you join in all our learning fun.
We have had a very busy week.
* Constable John has been visiting us to help us learn about Keeping Ourselves Safe. We are learning what we should do when we feel confused or uncomfortable in a situation.
* In maths we went outside to walk along a chalk number line Lesley drew on the concrete. Then we skipped along the number line. We decided that skipping was a faster way to move along the numberline and that is why we learn skip counting! Scarlett proved to be our champion skip counter, managing to skip count all the way up to 112 in 2s!
* We have been learning some of the moves for Jump Jam and on Friday after Jump Jam we practised playing our air guitars to help the school break a Nelson record of the most number of air guitarists playing in one place at one time. We will be joining the rest of the school on the front field on Wednesday at lunchtime to rock away to "Smoke on the Water".



* Many of us have a new skill in sewing running stitches. We thought it would be hard to begin with and some of us got into quite a muddle, but with perserverence and a good attitude we found that we could all do a running stitch. In fact we really enjoyed our sewing sessions. Take a look at our display in the classroom next time you are in.

* In the mornings we are learning the songs for our end of year production. The Kowhai syndicate will be performing 3 mini musicals as the production. Room 10 is teaming up with Room 12a and we will be performing Tadpole Rag. It is a musical about the life-cycle of the frog. Keep your eyes open for a letter coming home soon about costumes for your children. The dates of the production are 8 & 9 December at the School of Music.

Wonky Donkey

We were all so excited to see Craig Smith (aka the Wonky Donkey man) at school this week as part of the Nelson Arts Festival. He came to sing and read to us. We joined in singing the songs and thought he was pretty clever multitasking playing the guitar and harmonica at the same time. It was really challenging to make the water drop sound like the Wonky Donkey man in the drip song. Here he is reading his new book, Willbee the Bumblebee:

Patterns

It's lovely seeing everyone back at school this week. A special welcome to Arlee who has joined Room 10, too. This term is going to be very busy and I am sure we will learn lots.
To start the term we have been learning about patterns in maths. We have been looking at patterns to work out what comes next. It's been fun creating our own patterns, as well as patterns for our friends to work out. We have discovered that sometimes we need to look at colour to work them out, or shape, or orientation, or picture. These are some of our hole punch patterns (we used the pictures we punched out to repeat our patterns):

Tennis

We are having tennis lessons for the first 4 weeks of this term. Here we are learning some skills to improve our game!

Celebrations and Goodbyes

The last week of Term 3 saw us celebrating our learning of solids, liquids and gasses. We erupted our volcano on Thursday and it was a spectacular sight. There was a lot of "ooh-ing" and "aah-ing" and lots of the concepts learnt were talked about and observed. Unfortunately we had a malfunction with the videoing, but it did not stope the children enjoying the event.

On the last day of term we consolidated our learning of fractions by making fairy bread and dividing it equally between 2 and 4 people, so that they each had half or quarter of a slice. This was washed down with the lemonade we made the previous week. The yeast had caused such a lot of gas that it made an enormous "Chshshsh" sound and it looked like we were doing the volcano experiment all over again!!

Sadly we also said our "Goodbyes" to Andie who leaves us to move overseas with her family. We will miss you Andie, and wish you all the very best. I am sure we will meet up again sometime. Here is the class enjoying the Juicies Andie brought for them:

Folk Dancing Demonstration

Today was "The Big Day" as the children in Room 10 put it! After dressing up in their bandannas (the boys) and swirly skirts (the girls) the children lined up with their friends from Room 12A in the hall. There were lots of parents, grandparents and whanau who came to watch. Everyone had such a lovely time skipping and dancing. Thank you to the audience, who accepted the childrens' invitation to dance the Birdie Dance at the end. You all contributed to a very happy and memorable occasion.

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Lemonade

Whilst finding out more about the solid, liquid and gas elements of a volcano the children discovered that there was gas in the liquid magma. On Friday we decided to make a liquid that would also contain a gas. We made a sugar syrup, squeezed some lemons and added the magic ingredient, yeast, to make the gas bubbles. The recipe says to leave the lemonade for 4 days, so we have decided to leave it until this Friday, the last day of term, before we drink it!

We thought it would be good to label our bottle of lemonade. So, after making labels, the class had a vote to see whose label would grace the bottle - Andie's creation received the most votes. Well done Andie - you look very proud!

Violet Inventors

One of our sounds last week was the 'v' sound. On Friday we decided to become violet inventors, drawing a machine (in black pencil crayon) that made our violet invention (drawn in violet pastel). We created all manner of inventions, including:

* A machine that invents violet flowers. You punch in how many flowers you want and it makes them. (Marcus)
* A machine that makes violet mud to catch the baddies. (Jude)
* A machine that makes violet cars. (Andie)
* A violet rubbish truck. (Hunter)
* A violet hiccup house that contains a scary violet fish. When you enter the fish gives you such a fright you stop hiccuping! (Ruby)
* A machine that makes vvvvv's. (Jamie)
* A violet tidying robot. (Scarlett)
* A violet digger. (Oliver)
* A violet lollie machine. (Tavie)
* A machine that creates and makes violet clothes. (Lois)
* A baddie catcher with ropes and hands. (Sam)
* A violet box that makes violet sparkling light. (Tye)
* A violet racing car with spikes on the tyres to catch the baddies. (Louis)
* A violet lollie gun. (Ruben)

Solid, Liquid & Gas

As part of our inquiry topic we have been learning about the states of matter. We watched a cartoon about solids, liquids and gases and have also been learning a song about them. The children have asked to have access to the song from home, so here is the link to the site:
http://teacher.scholastic.com/activities/studyjams/matter_states/

After watching the cartoon we decided to be Room 10 molecules. We started off as a solid and as we were heated up by an imaginary fire we turned into liquid and moved a little faster and slightly further apart. We got heated up even more, turning into gas and we moved really fast and much further apart. Being gas molecules was the most fun!

Next week we will look at the parts of the volcano that are solid, liquid and gas. We will also continue working on our papier mache volcano, preparing it for a great explosion!

Calendar Art

We drew landscapes in pencil, then decided which parts to colour in warm and cool colours. We used different colour chalk pastels, blending them with our fingers. It was messy, but fun! These pictures have been created to be made into calendars and cards, which will make great gifts for family and friends. This is part of a school fundraiser organised by the Parent Community Group. There will be a notice about this coming home soon. If you would like to see the pictures, themselves, please come into the classroom to see them.

Soccer skills

Over the past few weeks we have been privileged enough to have some soccer skill training with Jordan from Nelson Soccer. We have been playing games like fox tails and rob the nest. Here are some pictures of us practising our skills:

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Exciting cress news!

Here is a picture of our cress on Thursday.



Wow! All our expectations were reached today when we noticed that our cress had grown some green leaves. Cress is amazing and it's certainly helped us learn the days of the week!

Time

In maths we are learning about time. On Monday we started growing some cress. We are taking photos of our seeds each day to see how they change over time. Here is what they looked like on Monday:



on Tuesday:










and on Wednesday:








We have noticed that there are little roots and shoots growing out of the seeds already. I wonder if there will be any green leaves by Friday?!

Here is a slideshow to show you some of the other time activities we have been doing:

Pyjama Day

Friday 20 August was Pyjama Day. We all came to school in our pyjamas, which felt really strange! We wondered if we should have a sleep at school ....

but we knew that wearing pyjamas on Pyjama Day was all about raising money for the orphanage in Cambodia.

Busy times

Room 10 has been super busy learning about so many things over the last little while:

We have visited the Nelson Provincial Museum, where Nicki talked to us about Precious Things. We learnt lots of language to help us with our descriptive writing in the classroom. A big thank you to all the parents who helped on this trip.

After the visit we wrote about our own special toys that are precious to us. Here are some examples:

I like my toy. She is my favourite toy. Her name is Fizz.
She has big shoes and she has blue skin. She has tickly hair.
Sometimes I take her to bed.
By Sam

My toy is soft. I play with my toy.
My toy has some ears. He wears a jacket. He likes carrots.
Can you guess what he is?
A bunny rabbit!
By Ruby





Over the past two weeks we have been learning to become Firewise. We had two visits from the firemen. The first to talk to us about what to do in the case of a fire as well as a safe place to meet; and the second to show us their shiny red fire engine with all the equipment they use to help save lives in fires and car crashes.