Our Art Focus for Term 1

As part of our Turangawaewae unit students create a portrait of themselves.  This year we are basing our portraits on an amazing New Zealand Artist called Darcy Nicholas.  I put together a presentation for the students to show them what Darcy's portraits look like.  The class has been working hard on planning our portraits so that they re-create his style.  Now it is time to start putting paint on the paper.

If you would like to take a look at the presentation we have been looking at please click here.

Being Scientists!

We are trying to discover, through our reading programme, what a scientist does.  Here this group of readers were actually having a go at being a scientist.  They had to make a guess about whether an item would float or sink and then test their ideas out.  They then had to record the results of this testing.

Sorting the Stones

This morning Cole decided to sort the stones Catherine found on the beach in Whanganui.  He decided which stones were similar and put them in different groups on the sorting grid. 

Our First Experiment - How Effective Soap is Against Viruses

Equipment:  soap, water, pepper and a bowl

1. We put water in a bowl.
2. We sprinkled pepper on top of the water.
3. We dipped our finger in and viruses (pepper) got stuck to our finger.
4. We wiped the viruses off with a tissue.
5. We put liquid soap on our finger and spread it all over our finger.
6. We dipped our finger in the bowl and the viruses dispersed.

This experiment showed us how important it is to use soap when we wash our hands.

Sunflower Champions?

Today Room 10 went to the garden to see the sunflowers that we planted last year.  Room 10's sunflowers were taller than Catherine.  We were surprised to see how tall they had grown over the holidays.  The classes are competing to see who can grow the tallest or the biggest or the craziest sunflowers.  We think we might win something?

Planting Sunflower Seeds

Yesterday Room 10 was planting sunflower seeds for the competition at our school.  Our class made flower pots out of newspaper because the newspaper is more healthy for the environment.   We will eventually plant some of our sunflower plants in the school garden for the competition.  We used seed mix to put in the flower pots.   It was a lot of fun planting our sunflower seeds.  After we put the soil in, we placed in the seed and then after that, we added more soil to cover the seed.  In the end, we put the flower pots into big trays outside and watered them with a spray bottle. Today we continued planting our seeds for the people who weren't at school yesterday.

Grandparents/Special Visitors Day

Today we had a lot of Grandparents and Special Visitors come to school for the morning.  After a special assembly, they were invited into the classrooms to see their mokopuna learning.  Room 10 were working on our writing.  We had been learning to write instructions - how to make a peanut butter sandwich. Grandparents read the instructions and their grandchild followed them or watched as the students worked in pairs.  It was a delicious writing lesson!

Muhammad invited the ladies that teach him and his siblings after school and they all came!

It was such a great morning!