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Welcome to Room 6 and Term 1

As we near the end of our first term for 2024, we reflect on some of our learning and shared experiences. We spent the first couple of weeks discussing and responding to our new whakatauki or motivational proverb “Reach for the Stars – Whawhai atu mo nga whetu.” We know we can achieve whatever we decide on because we have the suppot of our whanau, teachers and one another. We are looking forward to finding out how many stars we can reach this year.

We also discussed, shared and then voted on what we wanted our class to look like, sound like and feel like and like Nanda, we all signed our Class Treaty for the year, promising to try to follow the rules:

At the end of February, we were lucky enough to have a day’s sailing down at the Panmure Basin. We were very excited but also a bit nervous as none of us had sailed before. Once we put our life jackets on and got a few tips from Steph about launching our boats and using the sail and rudder, we were off. The weather was perfect and we had the best day.

                                           

In this last week of term we designed and created an outfit out of recycled materials as it was part of our Wearable Waste week. During our Young Ocean Explorers learning, we learned about the devastation litter has on our oceans and the sea life in it. We decided to do our bit by bringing recyclable litter to school to upcycle. We worked very hard on our creations and presented our outfits to the rest of the school at our Fashion Show:

   

Have a happy and safe holiday, to all our families. See you back next term.

 

 

Thinking for ourselves

Today we were learning to be observant when we see different media. We watched a video about a house hippo and thought about what we already know about hippos. We asked ourselves ” Did this make sense?”

Next we looked at different images and talked about why we thought they were real or fake. This photo tricked us. Do you think it is real or fake?

Leave your answer in the comments with your reason why.

 

 

Bigfoot Adventures comes to School

Yesterday we were lucky enough to come back to Term 4 and have a new experience. Bigfoot Adventures is funded by Auckland Transport and they go around to schools, teaching children about safety on bicycles. Kyla and Kate were our instructors and they introduced the importance of wearing the correct gear for cycling. Cyclists must wear fluorescent bright colours so drivers can see them easily and they must not wear sandals or crocs but only shoes that protect their feet.

At the beginning we all went and lined up shortest to tallest along the fence. We were given bikes that fitted our size and then we learned about fitting our helmets correctly. The children who were confident cyclists went with Kyla to the top court and those who were less confident went with Kate under the canopy.

After that we learned lots of new things like how to stop at a line, use hand signals, weave between cones, remain balanced on our bikes and only use the gears when we are pedalling.

Finally, the most exciting activity we did was having free time to practise the skills that we had already learned. We all enjoyed riding fast and taking our hands off the handlebars.

In conclusion, we are so grateful for the opportunity to learn how to cycle on our very own fleet of bikes. Hopefully, we will get more time to cycle this term.

                         

 

 

 

                           

 

Cook Island Language Week

Kia Orana. This week is Cook Island Language Week. We were able to experience children playing knucklebones and dancing and singing on an old movie our teacher found. The children have a lot of rhythm and seem very happy.

We also made our own class Tivaevae which is a traditional ‘quilt.’ We made ours out of two pieces of squared coloured paper. One piece was folded into quarters and we drew our design on that one. Then we cut them out (which was not as easy as it sounds) and stuck them onto the other piece of paper.

Some of our classmates are Cook Islanders and they shared their knowledge of their language with us. We chose a word or phrase we liked, wrote it on a strip of paper and added it to our class display. We learned that ‘meitaki’ means thank you, ‘ae’ means yes and ‘aere ra’ means goodbye (which is similar to ‘haere mai’ we say in Te Reo Maori.)

 

Room 6’s Matariki learning

This year, Matariki was on Friday, the 14th July. We were still on school holidays and the whole country enjoyed a public holiday. Last week when we came back to school we did a few fun Matariki activities.

We learned that the Matariki stars are a cluster of stars called the Pleiades and they rise in the early morning when it is still dark. They can be seen as the ‘eyes of god.’

We were looking at the Gregorian calendar which was introduced by Pope Gregory in 1582. This calendar is used by most countries in the world and the New Year begins in January. Matariki is the Maori New Year which is in July. Maori spent time together making memories and thinking about those who passed away. They also think about their goals for the future.

During the week we also learned how to play knuckle bones (ruru), which is a game Maori children played many years ago. We found five small stones each from around the school and learned how to throw them up and catch them on the backs of our hands. Then we had to gather the stones one by one each time we threw them up. We soon worked out it is easier not to throw them up too high!! Later in the week we started developing our own games of knuckle bones. Some of our parents said they played knuckle bones when they were younger. They are called different names around the world – Moa in Tonga, Aki in Samoa and Jackstones in the Philippines.

We made Matariki stars using cardboard circles and coloured wool. At the top of this post, is our new class display.

 

Quality comments

Our challenge this term  is to comment on our buddy class or individual blogs every week this term. It is important to read the blog post first so we can write a comment that is specific and thoughtful.

We have been crafting our blog comments first using the word lists if we need them.  This enables us to check our comments make sense before we post.

Do you have a top tip for writing quality blog comments?

A visitor from Poutama Class

We were excited to be able to welcome Miss Salton to Room 6. Miss Salton was farewelled from one of our Tuhi Mai Tuhi Atu buddy classes,  Poutama Class, a couple of weeks ago. She will be helping lots of classes in Levin with their Cybersmart learning.

We explored our Digital Footprint over 24 hours and recorded all the places we had visited online. We noticed how our digital footprint can grow very big very quickly. It is important to be kind, thoughtful and helpful online so we can create a positive digital footprint.

Sharing our first Screencasts

After practising creating our first screencast last week we were excited to share them on our edublogs.

We had to remember some important steps before publishing our posts  including:

  1. Sharing our screencast in Google Drive so it is visible to anyone looking at our blog
  2. Changing the display size so our video displays correctly

Mrs Grant created a screencast with these instructions on our class site too.

When our posts were published we used the widget in our class blog to visit the blogs of our class to check they were visible.

Click the images below to listen to some of our screencasts.