The Water Cycle

We have been listening to some songs on YouTube about the Water Cycle.  Now we know about ...

precipitation

evaporation

condensation



Matariki

Matariki is the celebration of the Maori New Year.  Matariki can mean 'eye of God'.  We know Matariki has started when the stars called The Seven Sisters appear early in the morning.  Celebrations for Matariki last several days.  Maori people enjoy kite flying and have a hangi to celebrate the new year.  Maori people also use that time to remember all those who have died in the past year. 

Our school celebrated Matariki at the end of Term 2 by making and flying our own kites, then having a shared lunch in our classrooms.  We made our kites using bamboo skewers, plastic bags, strings and tape.  We practiced flying our kites but we didn't have enough wind so we had to run fast to make them fly well!  Unfortunately some kite strings got tangled up but we managed to fix them in time to fly them again on our real Matariki celebration day when there was plenty of wind. 

We loved flying our kites so much that we flew them on other days too.

Best school attenders

Here are the students who had the best school attendance during Term 2.  Two of these students were at school EVERY day (that's 108 half days this term) and the others missed only a day or two of school.  No wonder these children are making great accademic progress!

Anne of Green Gables

As a treat our teacher told us we could watch one of the cutest movies ever made - Anne of Green Gables!  Miss B said that we would learn what it was like to go to school just over one hundred years ago and that we would meet a little orphan girl called Anne who was very clever with words and loves to use her imagination.   

Anne really was smart but talked so much!  We laughed a lot while watching the movie because Anne did cause a lot of trouble even though she didn't mean to.  An example of this was when Anne invited her friend Diana over for afternoon tea and served her current wine by mistake.  Poor Diana greedily drank several glasses of it and got drunk! 

The movie, Anne of Green Gables, is based on a book with the same name.  It was written by Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery.  The author got the idea for her story when she was just a child!

Cupcakes for the last day of the term!

Today was the last day of Term 2 so we are now half way through our school year!  Wow!  The year has gone by in a hurry but we've been working so hard we've hardly noticed. 

We get to have two weeks break from school but some of us think our holidays will be boring and would much rather stay at school.  This surprises our teacher because she always enjoys holidays, especially the chance to sleep in!

To celebrate the end of the term we wore mufti and our Teacher Aid, Mrs K baked cupcakes for us.  She brought them to our classroom this morning as a surprise.  They were so delicious.  ST gave Mrs K's cupcakes a score of ten out of ten for deliciousness!  HMMmmmmmm!

Red Nose Day

Are you ready for Red Nose Day?  Our teacher is! 

Red Nose Day is a special day to do crazy things like wearing a red nose to support the organisation Cure Kids as they research ways to treat life-threatening childhood illnesses in New Zealand.

We have been learning the Red Nose Day song 'You Make the Whole World Smile'!  We love it even though we know that "a little so and so" means us sometimes!

Here's a picture of us celebrating Red Nose Day

At the end of the day we ate some yummy red jaffas!  They looked like tiny red noses!

Shallow Seas

The BBC's Planet Earth videos are extremely interesting.  We watched the segment called 'Shallow Seas' and were shocked and surprised to see a great white shark snatching a poor seal in mid-air.  Watching the whole scenario in slow motion made us realise how scary it must be to see a shark up close.

Wacky Wednesday!

We read the book 'Wacky Wednesday' this morning.  It was written by Dr Seuss and tells the story of a child who wakes up in the morning to find that his world has suddenly turned quite wacky!  The story starts, "It all began with a shoe on the wall. A shoe on the wall shouldn't be there at all."   As the child reaches the kitchen she sees more strange things, then even more as she walks to school.  The day gets wackier and wackier until she returns to her bed. 

We had so much fun finding all the crazy things in the story.  We saw a cat pushing a baby's pram, a tree growing out a toilet, a student without a head, a lady taking an aligator for a walk and a giraffe's head peaking out of a sewer!  This inspired us to write our own Wacky Wednesday stories together with illustrations!

Here are some of our own wacky Wednesday ideas:

Oh no!  The chair has only one leg!

Oh no!  The boy has no pants!

Oh no!  The trees are upside down!

Oh no!  The girl has no head!

Oh no!  The lady has heaps of babies with no faces!

Oh no!  There is a baby in the tree!

Oh no!  There are many things wrong!

Oh no!  The girl has four arms!

Oh no!  What is happening?

Oh no!  There are cars on the runway!

http://www.seussville.com/

Poppy paintings inspired by Suzanne McLean

We have made more paintings inspired by Canadian artist Suzanne McLean.  This time our art is based on her poppy paintings.  To create our art we first painted the backgrounds using sponges, then we added our poppy flowers, buds and stems.  We are learning to layer paint on so that the colours become more vivid. 

  

What would you wear?

Our teacher taught us how to make a mini book, then she asked us to write a little story about what we would wear if we met someone famous.  We had to list the items of clothing we'd wear.  This was to help us practice using commas between items.  When we were done we illustrated our book.

This is the story KL (Year 3) wrote.  She used lots of descriptive language and interesting illustrations!

Spinning tops

We have been making spinning tops from our Clicko in our spare time.  Sometimes we use them competitively but today we were watching the design they make as they spin.  It's interesting that our tops have many sides but if they are spinning fast they look round.

More kite flying!

We enjoyed flying our kites so much that we were allowed to go outside again to fly them!  Unfortunately there was hardly any wind so we had to do a lot of running around to get them to fly!

Here is a kite design from Korea:

Basic Facts test

Today we had to sit a Basic Facts test to see if we have an improved knowledge of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.  We sat the same test at the beginning of the year.  Now we are able to measure our learning!

SF, Year 4 has made excellent progress with Basic Facts over the first half of the year!  She improved her addition skills by 34%, subtraction by 35%, multiplication by 58%, and division by 29%.  Wow!   That's impressive!

Turkish Delight

We got to try some Turkish Delight, a special Middle Eastern sweet.  We had to brush off the icing sugar before tasting the jelly-like delicacy.  When we picked one of the sweets from the box we didn't know if we had chosen a lemon or rose flavoured one.  Several of us thought Turkish Delight tasted like soap! 

The box that the Turkish Delight came in has six sides!  It's a hexagonal prism!

Kite flying

Today we got to go outside onto the field to fly our kites!  It was just windy enough for us to work out how to fly them.  Luckily only two people got their kite strings tangled and the rest of us managed to find our own space to fly ours without causing problems.  We would like to go outside again soon to fly our kites.  Hopefully there will be a little more wind next time so that our kites can fly even higher!

 

 

 

 

Kites

Kites are fun to play with.  They are cool because they fly high up in the sky.  When a storm is here and you fly a kite it may be dangerous so go inside your house and have some tea!  Be careful when you fly your kite. 

 

You can make your own kite at school or at home.  I think it is fun to make your own kite.  Kites are cool because they can fly up in the sky.

 

ST, Year 3

 

ST

 

Kites

Kites are a things that you fly in the sky.  Kites need to fly in the wind because if they don't they will get ruined.  Today we are making kites.  Sometimes kites can be useful like on special occasions like Matariki.  People can make kites.  Flying kites can be fun and cool, but sometimes dangerous.  I'm saying they're dangerous because they might go near power lines. 

 

AR, Year 3

How to make a kite

• First, you get a plastic bag then you cut it and make sure it is nice and flat. 
• Second,  get two sharp sticks.  Cut the sharp parts of the stick off so you can't poke somebody's eyes. 
• The third thing you do is get the two sticks and make a cross.  Put it on the flat bag.  Draw a diamond by marking each point of the cross and ruling lines between the points.  Cut the diamond out.
• Next, tape the sticks to the corners of the diamond.

TT, Year 4