MONDAY 30 AUGUST

Bit late with this post as we had a really busy day getting our learning done yesterday.  There was lots of teacher lead learning time and I completely forgot to blog the days events, not even a photo sorry!  We did heaps of work on our fairy tales work with Polly working on her Three Little Pigs book she is illustrating.  Ben worked on characters again today and we talked more about descriptive writing and how to give people good details so they can form a character in their imagination the way you want them to appear.  We also talked about appearance being important in describing a character, but just as important was describing a characters personality and any tidbits of information that should be given to a reader to help them understand why a character might make the decisions he/she does in a narrative.

It was a great days work, especially as we are all still quiet tired from the busy weekend and the winter blues!

VOLUNTEERING FOR DAFFODIL DAY

Ready for a Day of Selling!

The kids and I volunteered for Daffodil Day on Friday and they were fantastic. Ben and Polly definitely make extra money on Daffodil Day, because who wants to say no to a child supporting a worthwhile cause!  The kids sold so much Daff Day merchandise we ran out of most things!  We also made 13 batches of pikelets and sold all but 5 pikelets.  The best part was raising an awesome amount of money for such a worthwhile cause.  It is really important to me to give the kids opportunities to not only participate in the community we live in but also contribute to the community in a positive way .... and that was what today was all about.  Boy they did such an awesome job, and while we were all very tired after our 10 hour day, we all felt a great deal of satisfaction at the end of it.

Thank you Benjamin and Pollyanna for making such a positive contribution to your community :)

HAPPY IN OUR SPACE

We had a bit of organising to do first thing this morning for tomorrows Daffodil Day, where the kids and I will be working on a Pikelet Stall all day outside the National Bank at Huapai :0  We then spent the afternoon working on our new Fairy Tales English theme.  Ben is working on characters and their descriptions, while Pollyanna was working on The Three Little Pigs worksheet (this week her learning is concentrated on this Fairy Tale).  They were so happy to be sitting learning this afternoon, it was almost a shame we had to stop and go to Drama!  I will add a photo of my quiet class tomorrow, instead of uploading it right now, I am just going to sit back and watch my happy students learning!

A FAVOURITE: LEARNING ABOUT FAMOUS NEW ZEALANDERS

In Social Studies for most of this term we have been learning about famous New Zealander's ... not too in depth but just enough so they can appreciate what people have done to contribute to New Zealand history.  So far we have done Edmund Hillary, Kate Sheppard, Jean Batten, Burt Munroe, and today we introduced Sir Apirana Ngata and the amazing work he did for Maori.  We use the same format each session, they sit on the mat and listen to 5-15 minutes of information about the person in question and then they get a sheet of paper with a box for a drawing relating to the person and some lines for writing about them on.  This worksheet is to reinforce the small amount of knowledge they have gained about this person.  Then they are laminated and put up on the wall with the rest of the famous New Zealander's we have studied.  

While this is a superficial type of learning, I hope it is helping them understand all the different ways people can contribute to history.  Incidentally, the New Zealand History website is a wonderful reference for all things history which relate to NZ!

A NEW SCIENCE TOPIC: PHYSICS

We started a new science topic today (probably my least favourite one, not that I told them that!) PHYSIC'S :) We started with a general description of what was included in this topic as its not self-explanatory.  And then as a gentle warm up to the topic, the kids undertook some worksheets on motion and energy types.  I found some great worksheets for science from TLS Books and the website is definitely worth taking a look at for resources.  The worksheets were aimed at just providing them with a familiarity at some of the common words used in physic's.  This is where I think it is hard for kids to grasp on to physic's because its like learning a new language.  Anyway, they totally conquered the tasks today and we now know more about motion in particular! 

SPACE POSTERS COMPLETE

The kids spent the morning finishing off their space posters which are now hung proudly in the classroom.  They worked really hard over the last few weeks with their researching and learning about good question writing.  The accumulation of this work is now all on their poster with photos they printed using the Google image search, one of their new favourite things to do!

Well Done you guys, you did really well with your Space Projects and the posters are a tribute and fitting end to our space learning for this year!

MATHS: SCALE

Ben had the best time in Maths today, using a scale ruler and making all the furniture out of colour relevent pieces of card to go on the scale drawing of our classroom.  He thought this was a fantastic task to undertake :)  He really enjoyed seeing everything fit perfectly into the class and has a really good understanding now of why scale is relevent.  This maths task couldn't have been possible without the help of Steve (thank you honey) who provided a fantastic scale drawing of the class at 1:50 and then provided the appropriate scale ruler for me to translate to Ben!

Pollyanna was doing her maths work at the same time of course but she was less than impressed with her tasks given the fun Ben was having with his ... sorry Pollyanna but sometimes Maths just isn't cracked up to be much fun, especially when you are learning to order numbers from 1 to 100 and the same examples keep popping up.

For some reason at the moment I can't attach photos to my post ... honey I may need your help!