Miss Walpole - Guest teacher for the morning

Miss Walpole is leading the class this morning. She earned this privilege as she displays great diligence in class. Here she is leading the class for a spelling activity. She then went on to review the criteria for instruction writing. I am impressed by her behaviour management - look at the focussed students.

Te Reo Maori

We have been learning some more Maori phrases.
Do you know what the children are saying?

Boat Building Challenge

Today we completed a boat building challenge.

We had to build a boat that could be used on a voyage.
It needed to:-
float for 2 minutes
hold 10 100 blocks
have a space for storage and shelter
be no larger than an A3 piece of paper.

There was a lot of cooperating, revising, problem solving, testing, designing, compromise and creativity taking place in our room.

Floating and Sinking Experiments

How's this for exciting learning?

It's great when kids jump for joy discovering new things.
We have been predicting which items will float and sink. Harriet was jumping for joy every time her prediction came true.

Incredible writers

We are just sitting down to write a story about an adventure on a vaka. I am creating a word bank for their writing. I asked for some words that they might need. This is what they suggested

adventurous
lightning
tsunami
courageous
overboard

I am so impressed with how more complex their vocab has become. they want their writing to be specific.
At the beginning of the year the suggestions would have been
water
sea
boat

What a great class.

Tawhiao's Pepeha

Tawhiao brought in his Pepeha to show the class. He was very proud of his whanau and it created great discussion about where we are from. What an awesome way to present it too.

Maori

Here we are practicing some of our new sentences about our whanau.
We stand in two lines - introduce ourselves to our opposite partner and when the time is up one line moves a step down the line to a new partner. I explained it is like speed dating where we get to know a little bit about each other (not that I have done it!!!)
Our sentences

Ko wai koe?    Ko (name) ahau
No hea koe?  No (place) ahau
Ko (name) toku mama
Ko (name) toku papa
Ko (name) toku kuia
Ko (name) toku koro.