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)