We enjoy going to our Learning Centre on a Monday. This is the place where we issue books for ourselves and the class. We also go to our Learning Centre for Kapa Haka and for assemblies.
Tracey is our librarian and she helps us to get books and reads us some stories.
The students are working hard to expand their reading 'powers' during our guided reading sessions and are working on making their reading sound like talking. They are starting to listen to themselves as they read and check that it makes sense and sounds right.
The following students took a photo of their favourite picture in the book and then read their story.
As part of our inquiry, 'Who Am I?' the students have been learning about what makes them unique. Mrs. Shaw read several stories to them that highlighted what makes them unique.
They talked about things they like, what they are good at and special talents they have. With a buddy the students created a pictorial Venn diagram to show their likes, interest and talents.
The students used these pictures to create their own monster. The pictures make up the body parts of the monster, e.g. a swimming pool body, rainbow legs, fluffy cake tummies, rugby ball head etc. Each monster represents their uniqueness.
The students are busy learning about numeral identification and the basic addition facts that they don't already know. We are using the following learning games with each group:
'Counting Fish!' - put the right number of fish in the bowl
'Egg shaker box' - add the two numbers together that the beads land on
'10 frame game' - to make 10 on the spot
'I see 10' - add any two numbers together to make 10
Learning to be safe in an online environment is very important, especially in this day and age. The KidsedchatNZ topic this week was a timely reminder for all.
Our buddy class came over and together we watched and discussed the Digital Safety video.
It was great to see how students used our school virtues of Co-operation and Helpfulness during the session.
Here are some of their tweets:
Q1. "How can you be safe on the internet?"
Q2. "How can you keep your computer safe?"
Q3. "Who teaches you about staying safe online?"
Q5. "What is a digital footprint....?"
Q8. "How do we know which websites and people to trust online?"
Q9. "What should you do if your personal information is hacked?"
Q10. "Any websites/resources or apps to share about Cyber Safety?"
In our writing session, the students started with drawing a picture of themselves and then wrote at least one (or more) simple sentence underneath. I had been very impressed with the independence most of them displayed.
The students continued today with learning the 'doubles' that we started with last week. I drew a hopscotch grid with numbers up to 5. Instead of hopping through it on one foot as usual, the students hopped on a number and said "1+1=2", "2+2=4" and so on. Everyone worked hard and did their best.
This week we had Harold visiting our school. We learnt that everyone is a very important person and that we are all unique and special.
We are important...
Harold showed us his photo album with pictures of himself getting older and bigger. We talked about things that we need to help us grow up healthy and happy. They are: food, water, oxygen, washing, exercise, shelter, safety, sleep and love.
The students in Room 4 is busy learning doubles up to at least 5 + 5. This is one important strategy for learning addition facts. Our goal is to spend enough time on doubles for these addition facts to be instant without the need to count.
The outcome: When knowing the doubles it will help them to learn the "double neighbour" facts, such as 3 + 4 and 2 + 3.
Today we used double flash cards and students then recorded their understanding of it.
Today was the first KidsedchatNZ for this year. Room 4's tuakana buddy class also joined the chat. They helped the teina with tweeting from our class twitter account and some of them used their own account to share their ideas.
In preparation for the chat we all watched the video on 'Greatness' and then answered the questions as they were tweeted out.
Here are some of the students' tweets:
Q2. "Greatness is for all of us. How are you going to be great this year? How are you going to achieve this?
Q4. If you could be great at anything what would it be? What would you like to be great at at school?
Q5. The video says. "Greatness is not born, it's made." What does this mean?
Q8. Describe what a 'Great Teacher' looks like?
Q9. Finish this sentence. Greatness starts..... Q10. Write a short sentence using these 3 words: Greatness - Effort - Teamwork
