Week 3 - Bullyfree NZ Week

This week is Bullyfree week across New Zealand. We have been focusing some of our learning around this important topic. Today, Mr Riceman challenged us to create some word clouds that showed the type of people we want to be and to be around.

First, we came up with some ideas for words. Reading the book 'Oat the Goat' helped us out yesterday.  We added these words into the site www.wordart.com . Mr Riceman then helped us to format our words in different ways. This was lots of fun. Then it was time to share them so that they can be added to this blog post. You can see some of these word clouds below. We may add in some more as they are finished too.

 Please have a look, have a read and let us know what you think with a positive, thoughtful and helpful comment.

Week 2 - Taha Tīnana

Kia ora!

This term, our learning in Te Reo Māori is linked with our Inquiry focus on healthy living - hauora tīnana.  We have been learning about different types of food and how it helps keep our bodies healthy.

Here are the different names of food we have learnt in Te Reo.

This poster is displayed in our window so we can practise finding the word matching the picture.
Here are Paige, Lewis, Ashwin and Cyan matching some. You might like to have a go when you come visit, too.

This week we also practised our manners for mealtimes... asking where a food is, asking someone to pass it, and responding politely.

"Kei whea te _______?" means "Where is the _______?" E.g. Kei whea te pata?=Where is the butter?
"Homai he _______," means "Gave me (pass) a/some ____." E.g. Homai he pata. = Pass some butter.
"Anei he _______," means "Here is a/some _______." E.g. Anei he pata. = Here's some butter.

Here we are, practising asking each other to pass an item of food.

Ka kite ano!

Week One - ANZAC Literacy

Talofa Lava bloggers and welcome to Term Two,

We have had a busy start to the term this week. During our Literacy learning, we have been focusing on the theme of ANZACs and ANZAC day. This is because ANZAC day was acknowledged during the second week of the school holidays.

For creative writing, we described what we thought it would have been like in a Trench and wrote home to describe this experience using our senses.  To help get a better understanding we read two picture books, Jim's Letters by Glyn Harper and The ANZAC Puppy by Peter Millet and Trish Bowles. The illustrations in these books helped us to learn and plan what we would include in our writing.

Using our plan, we then created a piece of writing, focusing on using simple and compound sentences to describe what we saw and what was happening.  Here are two examples of writing below,

Daiki's writing:
 Dear Mum and Dad,
How are you both feeling? Here in the trench it is not going well!  It is not good for children to stay here. I am feeling sad because bandage around  my friends bodies. Now we are going to get our guns out. On the top of the hill I can hear the gunshots coming close to me and I can also hear the Bullets going into the water or sea. I Could smell the blood  from the people that died  in the war. I can feel the pain in the injury that I have and I can also feel the dust going into my eyes. I miss home because we don't have time to have showers. I can’t sleep that well because of the explosion of the bombs. BOOM! CRASH! BAM! I wish that I could be at home right now. My clothes and socks smell like the sewer YUCK!. MY tummy is saying I want to have a Barbecue.
I hope you guys are having fun.

TJ's writing:
Dear family
How are you all? The trench is not a safe place for the children. We are feeling sad because people are getting shot, even some of my friends. When I run  through the water, I can hear lots of splashes. The gunshots and bombs smells like smoke.  My dirty stinky clothes feel gross .I can see rain dropping. I am worried because I hope the children won't do this when they are my  age .I am scared because I think I'm going to be dead. I am afraid  because we're getting less soldiers. I'm looking forward to getting home I can't wait to taste  mums best biscuits. And I can't wait to play with the children.
From TJ

We hope to use our creation skills to publish these on a postcard too. Please feel free to leave some postiive, thoughtful and helpful comments.

Week 9 - The Drain Game Caravan

Kia Ora bloggers,

This week the Great Drain Game Caravan came to visit our school.  This was an opportunity for us to learn more about water, waste water, wetlands and our school environment.  The Great Drain Game caravan has an awesome interactive model.  As a class, we got to see where our water flows to when we put different waste in different places.


One important message was that anything that gets into the drain will end up at the sea, without any treatment.  That is why it is important to remember the phrase "Only rain goes down the drain". We did a survey of our school to find the different drains that we have on site and added these to a map.


Any dirty water that goes into the sink will travel to the 'Waste water treatment plant'.  Here, the dirty water that has gone down the sink or toilet gets cleaned before it is released again. Wetlands also do a super job slowing down water to stop flooding and naturally cleaning water.


Most of Kaiwhare decided that putting on the special headsets and exploring Virtual Reality environments was their favourite activity.  Overall, it was a great session of learning. We finished by making a pledge which will help to conserve water. Check back as we share these in a DLO next week.


A big thank you to our parent and adult helpers on the day.  If you would like to find out more, please leave us a positive, thoughtful and helpful comment.

Week 8 - Zupelz Maths and logic

This term we have been working really hard on our Maths.  We start our math sessions with a warm-up.  This week we shared an investigation to solve a zupelz puzzle. 

We need to use lots of mathematical thinking to solve this.  We can recall combinations that add together to make numbers, understand and identify even and odd numbers then finally, use logic to explain why certain numbers fit in a particular place.  Below you will see our whiteboard discussion about even numbers.  To our maths group the word even means something fair or something that is shared evenly. Our definition of an even number was a number that could be split into two groups and the groups were the same size. You can see how we proved the numbers in the list were even.

Then we had four numbers to organise into the grid.  Each row and column needs to add up to the number on the outside.  We started by placing the number four in the even box.  We then used our knowledge of combinations to place the three and the two in the correct boxes in the grid.  This left us with one digit to place which was one and it only had one place to go.  

We used lots of thinking, discussing and reasoning to solve this with our buddy. Our next challenge is to solve larger grids using the same thinking. We would love some of your positive, thoughtful and helpful feedback about our mathematical thinking.