It's the end of our 2014 school year - Merry Christmas!

To all my lovely students moving on to Year 2 in 2015, I wish you all the best.  I do hope you stay as enthusiastic about your learning as you have been with me this year.  

Remember to always use your Virtues and enjoy your new learning experiences.

A warm thank you to all the Room 4 parents who have been so actively involved in their child's learning this year.  I've enjoyed our home-school connection and all the informal 'catch-ups'.  A special thanks to Carly who've helped us when we were tweeting with KidsedchatNZ.

Enjoy the holiday with your children.  A Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all!

Also, a big  to our Quadblogging buddies and everyone else who've visited our Class Blog this year. Thank you for leaving us your comments and thoughts.

Wishing you all a

End of Year Awards Assembly

We have been practicing to sing our new school song 'Simply the Best' at our prize giving, because our school and teachers are the best!




We had our end of year awards assembly on Tuesday afternoon.  Lots of us received awards for our hard work during the year.

Video credits: Mrs Allen

Class Awards

This week we congratulate our buddies who've received class awards.

Harry for showing Respect to others.
Terrance for Friendliness and Respectfulness shown in class.
Mckenzie for patience and kindness shown in class.
Emma for the Co-operation shown in class.

Good work!

Happy birthday!

Happy 6th birthday to Jessica!

Thank you for the yummy cake! We enjoyed your class party.

Flower Show

One of our highlights this term was our Flower Show on Friday. We used our creativity and made some really cool arrangements with flowers and vegetables.

Christmas Trees

After lunch today, we made Christmas trees.  Caleb's oma and aunt came in to help us.  Thank you very much for the wonderful idea and helping us to make our Christmas trees!

We had lots of fun gluing our pom poms on our cones.

Addition and Number recognition

We have been working on learning our numbers and adding them together. Maths is our favourite time of the day.

Some of us used our iPads to show what we were learning.





Learning to add with Tuakana/Teina.



We were learning to make 9, by completing the dominoes pictures.

We were learning about the number 4 and how to write it. 

Participating in KidsedchatNZ

Being 5 years old is not holding us back to participate in the weekly Kidsedchatnz, thanks to our teacher who have organized a parent to help us this year.

We want to thank Carley for coming in many Thursday afternoons to help us tweet our ideas and answers to the KidsedchatNZ questions! You are so cool!

Here is Carley helping us with this week's topic: Snacks, Food and Vegetables

Athletics practise

We have been practicing almost every day (if not raining) for our school athletics.

Today we have been learning how to do our high jump and long jump with our buddy class. We really enjoyed it, because they are fun.

Calf and Pet Day

We had a great time at our school's annual Calf and Pet Day.  It was fun to bring our pets and to show them off!

Mr Taylor, raised the most money in the jar and he had to kiss a real pig!

Jess and Riley also won trophy's! Congratulations!

Some of our Fotobabbles can be viewed here.

Our Class Production

The Lorax by Dr Suess

Our story began in a plastic world called Thneedville, everything uses 96 batteries and when you swim in the water your body glows!  

The Onceler had finally found  Truffullla Trees he had searched the world for Trees such as those.  The Lorax was devastated as the super-axe-hacker chopped these taonga/treasures down four at a time... no more fruits for the Barbaloots... they got crummies in their tummies...  

GA ZUMP !!!

“I am the Lorax I speak for the trees, I speak for the trees as the trees have no lungs and I’m asking you Onceler at the top of my lungs!  STOP cutting down the trees....”  Jess (our Lorax) said.

At the end of our story the last Truffula Tree is chopped down and our final song with flowers asked the audience to let things grow. 

Learning Outcomes From our play for children...

Dance: Children developed skills in improvising a towns person in Thneedville, they used energy and expression as guitarists in  “How Bad Can I Be?”.  Then they utilized the whole space during the Barbaloot Serenade, on stage and holding hands with a partner through the audience.  

Drama:  Children developed confidence and awareness of performance, they used the ideas in the book and movie and made decisions on what characters would do, the voices they would need and actions characters would make.  

Communicating and Interpreting stories like The Lorax helps with their understanding of drama and its purpose in our lives and in our community.

Congratulations Room 4 on your confidence, joy, enthusiasm and developing skills in Drama!

A special Thank you to Whaea Jean who came to support our learning in the Preforming Arts each week, you are so amazing and we couldn't have pulled it off without you  xxx

What are we learning when using technology?

We have been learning to make choices and manage our time with Ms van der Spuy and she lets us use technology all the time in our learning.  

With our iPads we can show our buddies what we are doing and it helps us with explaining our learning. Using our Notebooks, we publish our learning on our own blogs or we work on our Individual Learning Plans on the Class Wiki.

When we have ICT we are able to work on our Typing Skills, or we have a choice between Snailbob, Lightbot or drawing a Stickman. With these activities, we are learning to practice our Creativity, Problem Solving and Thinking Skills.

We are learning to find our own creative ways to do something and we enjoy working with anyone and everyone.

Coding with Lightbot

After we received some class awards for our coding with Lightbot, Mr Taylor was very interested to learn more about what we are doing.  Ms van der Spuy said he should come and have a look at how we are learning about programming in our class.  

We programmed Lightbot with some simple commands where he has to light up tiles and showed Mr Taylor how it works.  Then he wanted to have a go...


We were very impressed, as he was really getting good at this!

Learning to work with-in 10

We have been working hard to learn our maths.  We used our iPads to work out what number is missing. Everyone could choose if we want to show our work on Doodle Buddy or with Explain Everything.

Here are some of our work:

How I make 9 - Jackie



Making 7 - by Imogen

How many more to make 8? - by Mckenzie

I work out how many more I need to make 8 - by Christopher

Adding to 8 - by Jayden



How many more to make 7? - by Emma

Making 8 - by Terrance

I explain how I make 8 - by Riley

KidsedchatNZ rocks!

We love being part of KidsedchatNZ and like all the interesting topics that are coming up.

Why do we like it?

It is nice to see what other classes are doing and what they are learning. What is really cool, is that we can talk with other students all over New Zealand in a safe place, because we subscribed to the list that we follow when it is the chat.

Come on Buddies, you too can be part of this wonderful experience!  Go to the KidsedchatNZ blog to find out more.

Matariki

We learned about Matariki and created our art around the Seven Stars.

Cultural Festival

We performed our Kapa Haka items at the Reporoa Cluster Cultural Festival, which is held every year in Reporoa.  We all had a great time and at lunch time some of us had hangi.

Thank you to Matua Grant and Whaea Martha who helped us during our weekly Kapa Haka practices.  We are lucky to have you.

Thank you to all our parents who came to support us.

We love Kapa Haka.







Fun at Reporoa Cluster Culture Festival - Article in Rotorua Daily Post

Using our blue thinking hats with Explain Everything

We used our blue thinking hats to find our favourite part in our reading books.  We use 'Explain Everything' on our iPads to take a photo of that page, cut it out and then we told some of the story in our own words.

 

Cross Country 2014