Room 12 goes green!

This week as part of our Inquiry unit we have been looking at recycling, to minimise the amount of rubbish we send to the tip as landfill. Its amazing how much rubbish we make just by eating our lunch!

We set up our class recycling crates and got organised to classify and sort our lunchtime rubbish.

Its been tricky working out the difference between soft and hard plastics, and to work out what is ok to put in the school worm farm, but we are excited about doing our bit to reduce our impact on the environment.

Subitizing...?

This week in maths we have enjoyed playing different games to improve our ability to subitize. Subitizing is a fancy name for seeing smaller groups of dots within a larger group to work out how many dots there are, without actually counting them. It's a great way to develop basic facts knowledge and reinforces the idea that numbers can be shown in a lot of different ways: eg: 8 can be 5 and 3, 7 and 1, 4 and 4 or 6 and 2. 

Games we played include Deal and Copy, Memory Match and What's the difference. Whatever game was played, lots of fun and lots of learning was had by all!

Reach for the stars

This week we have been looking further at having a Growth Mindset, tying it in with our value of the term: Creativity. We have talked about never giving up, trying new things and looking at 'mistakes' or 'dead ends' as opportunities. As a reminder we made "Reach for the Stars' bookmarks.

Decorating our creations with stars also helped remind us of our blend for the week- 'st'.

Science and Inquiry with Room 12

Today we started our Inquiry Unit for Term 4. We are looking at how what we do today impacts the future. Our focus is on Sustainability and in particular rubbish: What it is? How much do we make? and What happens to it after it leaves our hands?
We collected all the rubbish we created while eating our morning tea and then our lunch. We sorted the rubbish into groups (Yuk!) and then buried it.(Huh?) 

Our morning tea rubbish sorted into groups.

After our lunch rubbish was added in!

 Burying our rubbish.

 

 

We will dig it back up in 7 or 8 weeks to see what has happened to it... watch this space!

New students for Room 12.

Today we had two new 'students' come to our class. They were very well behaved and almost got through their visit without any 'accidents'. Luckily it was a sunny day and we were able to enjoy our time together outside.

Room 12 gets a head start on term 4!

In term 4 our value of the term is Creativity. Today we got our creative juices flowing in advance, creating all sorts of things out of boxes and cardboard. 

There were ships and robots, planes and kites, dinosaurs and even multi storied storage boxes to keep our treasures in! There was heaps of fun had by all and a huge mess to clean up afterwards but it was all worth it.

Term 3 Inquiry.

For Inquiry this term we have been looking at how we can represent our own culture, represent our own life story. As part of this we each designed a 'mini totem', decorating it using patterns and shapes that represented, for us, our family and background. Some children used stripes or shapes to represent each family member-

'The 2 little rectangles are me and my brother, the big rectangles represent my mum and dad.' by C

Others used different colours-

'The orange stripes are my dad and the blue stripes are my mum, cause that's the colours they like.' by B

Some drew a pattern of love hearts-

'I did love hearts cause that's what families are about.' by N

One student did a pattern of squares and kiwis-

' cause we are kiwi hub.'

Another's creation was very colourful-

This shows the things I like in this world. These are the suns rays and these are my ABC's.'

It was amazing to see what each child came up with and how they represented the things that are important to them. Well done everyone!

A super hero comes to visit.

This morning we were treated to a visit from a real life super hero- Super Money Man from the ASB. He came to teach us about coins and notes and what they represent. 

He even showed us how to strike a really good super hero pose!

We pretended to do jobs like mowing the lawns and then he talked about what we could do with the money we earned.

The concepts of saving, and needs versus wants were also discussed!  Thanks Super Money Man for a fun and educational talk!

Maori language week

As part of Maori language week we are looking at Maori legends. Today we read 'The Battle of the Mountains.' Afterwards we all made a paper representation of the mighty Tongariro. All the colouring, cutting and pasting was a good way to develop our fine motor skills.

Calendar art completed!

Our art  for the calendar fundraiser is all finished and we are really proud of our work. Come on in and see it close up. Its on display in the classroom. Order forms are on their way so don't miss out!

Learning to be a good loser!

Take 25 hoops and a bunch of children. Put the hoops on the ground in a long squiggly line with half of the children at each end. 

After 'Ready, set, go,' the leader of each line starts jumping through the hoops to get to the other end. .

When the two jumpers meet, they do 'rock, paper, scissors'  to see who continues and who returns to the back of their teams line. As soon as the loser returns to the back of their line, the next jumper sets off to meet the opposition. 

The first one to get to the end of the line wins for their team!

This fast moving game allowed everyone to repeatedly experience winning and losing, and to learn to deal with changes of fortune, without getting upset!!  It also got the heart rate up and encouraged the children to cheer on their teams members. Bring on more sunny days!