Technology Week

A great time was had by everyone last week and lots of engaging learning took place. Students in all four activities - 3D printing / Coding, Go Karts, Cooking and Wearable Arts learned plenty of new skills. Everyone had positive attitudes and enjoyed the challenges put their way. Our Learning Star values were certainly used and the great outcomes reflected this.
Students will be reflecting on their technology week on their blogs this week so watch out for their reports. As well as this, parents and students will be asked to complete a short google forms survey as a way of giving feedback around the technology week.
Here's a few photos of what we got up to....

 

 

What's Up - Wk 3

Week 3 already and we all seem to be very busy with winter sports kicking into full gear. It’s really neat to see the range of sports the children are playing and following their team’s progress.

Maths is continuing along nicely and we begin to look deeper into the connection between decimals, percentages and fractions this week. We explore how we can convert between all three to help us solve problems and use this strategy to prove our answers in a number of different ways.

On Thursday we have our second session of the Otago Problem SOlving Challenge which pushes the children’s problem solving skills.

In reading we continue to read about our enviro focuses, Room 3 planting and Room 4 bees. In writing we begin to turn our notes into an information report to present the knowledge we have gained. Monday’s writing sessions are a free writing session which the children are really enjoying. They have a focus for their writing to practice a particular skill. Today for example was to vary the way we start our sentences. They are provided with a picture and a 1-2 sentence story starter and then they can let their imagination take control. We have been impressed at the creativity we are seeing!

We continue to work on our mihi’s and begin to start using the greenscreen to make it visual. Be sure to check out our blogs in the next week or two as we get them put together. We had another exciting Japanese lesson this afternoon with Mrs Karasawa so make sure you ask the children to share their new vocab with you.

Other than that business as usual. Enjoy your week and feel free to pop in and say hi.

What's Up Week 2

We had a great first week back; it was awesome to see everyone come back well rested and ready to get stuck into some good learning.

Last week had our first Japanese lesson, which left all the kids buzzing and looking forward to our next lesson - which will be today (Monday).  We also began looking at fractions in maths and have had some fabulous discussions around this learning. We continue to investigate fractions this week and will move into equivalent fractions and then adding and subtracting fractions.

In reading and writing we will begin putting the note taking skills we learned last week into practice and start looking at putting those notes together into reports.

Tech choices were made last week. This week on Wednesday we will be having a pre-planning session where students will join their tech group and go over their project and what things are needed. Students will find out what group they are in Tuesday or Wednesday morning.

Everyone was given an IXL password last week. This is a maths program that can be accessed on both computers and ipads and should help students to reinforce the learning taking place in the classroom.

I will be out of the classroom for a few days at the end of this week and the beginning of next week. I have a course to attend on a couple of days and a family event in  Hawkes Bay. Alison Eagar will be in the class and will be running the usual programme so there should be minimal disruption for the students.

As always you are welcome to pop in or email me if you wish to chat about anything.

Japanese

Monday saw us take part in our first Japanese language session. Luckily for me (as my Japanese is as limited as the kids) we had Fleur from St Mary's school come and lead the lesson.  It was a really fun lesson and we were all buzzing afterwards.
We were introduced to some common greetings in Japanese and played some games to help reinforce those greetings.

We are trying hard to use as many of the greetings as we can. We spend a few minutes each morning going over the pronunciation and reminding ourselves of when we should use the different greetings. 

We now have a wall display to help us remember our greetings

And we are getting pretty good  at pronouncing and remembering after only two days - listen to this.....