Term 3, Week 9

Thank you so much to the awesome Room 3 Team for the super swimming and super behaviour at the ASB Aquatic Centre last week – and a huge thanks also to all of the families who came along to support us. We really appreciate your interest and your assistance with that quick change afterwards, and would love to see you all again this week!

As we enter the final week of Term 3 we’ll also be wrapping up our painting unit with a final look at landscapes on Friday when we choose our own maunga (mountain) to illustrate using crayon and dye. We’ll get a bit of throwing practice in ready for athletics in Term 4, solve some story-based maths problems, read a little, write a little, and wind down ready for a jolly good rest! We’ll also be learning some new phrases in te reo maori to help us to talk about who our friends are. This will be particularly helpful this week as we welcome four visitors from Room 2. These young ladies will be joining Room 3 officially at the beginning of Term 4 as a fresh surge of new entrant children moves up to Room 2 from Room 1, and we are really excited about sharing our classroom, our learning and our friendships with them. 

Finally, a very big thanks to all for the phenomenal effort on the homework and classroom learning this term – our students are so lucky to have such wonderfullly supportive families nurturing their young minds along the way :) Wishing you all a very well deserved holiday! 

Swimming lessons!

Rooms 1, 2 and 3 are super excited to have begun our swimming lessons at the ASB Aquatic Centre. Here we are being put into our groups. Watch out for our individual stories and photos on our classroom walls, coming early next week! A huge thank you to all the families who have come along to support us :)

Hunter and Mikaela go green!

Today three senior boys from our Enviroteam (Reuben, Alex and Caleb) were weeding our edible gardens and sowing our seed potatoes into buckets ready for our class-vege-garden-in-a-bucket challenge. Hunter and Mikaela came along to help out - these girls are natural green fingers!! Thanks ladies!! You can also see a cameo appearance here from Ben in Room 1 :)

Writers' Spot

Six awesome Room 3 authors shared their writing for the Writers' Spot during assembly today. In Room 3 we have been writing non-fiction like scientists, using precise scientific language to describe the chemical processes that produce and consume energy.

Today Daniella, Jayden, Maya, Jade, Lucia and Joseph taught us about energy, photosynthesis, food chains, digestion, metabolism and excretion.

Term 3, Week 8

Another wonderful week of science, te reo, tikanga maori and te ao kori, painting, literacy and numeracy has simply flown by (we watched the clock this time as it passed)!

And so here we are, diving with a splash into the final two weeks of term, kicking off the swimming programme at the ASB Aquatic Centre. For families who wish to watch us swim or to help us out with the quick change afterwards, our time in the water will be 1.30 – 2.30. For half of this time we will be having our swimming lessons, and for the rest of the time we will have free play in the wave pool (while Rooms 1 and 2 have their lessons). Do come along!

Some key reminders for this week and next;

1. Please name all clothing items (and towels, togs and goggles), and make sure that you have practised changing into and out of both togs and uniform (including shoes). A fast change at the pool means that we get back to school in good time for a 3 o’clock pick up.

2. Each year a number of plastic shopping bags rip or grow holes, spilling out dry towels and uniforms onto the wet floor poolside and in the changing rooms. If possible, please check that swim bags are strong and also large enough to fit your child’s clothing – a uniform and shoes take up much more space than togs and goggles J

3. Please pack children a big lunch each day, and ensure an early bedtime each night (you may wish to cut homework shorter than usual) – we need lots of energy!!

On a final note, Mrs Sylvia Laurence will be teaching in Room 3 on Wednesday and Thursday of this week, as Miss Driver is on classroom release, and working with our senior Envirogroup. 

We've been investigating...

Room 3 have been thinking like scientists this week, investigating how surface tension and the relative density of substances can affect the way in which chemicals either mix or lie one one top of the other.

Specifically, we found out that we had to add soap to milk in order to break the surface tension and allow the spots of liquid colouring on the surface to mix...

We also found out that when we put skittles into water, the colour dissolves. However, because the colour is denser than the water it does not float and mix across the dish, but rather sinks to the bottom. It sits alongside other colours much like blobs of paint can sit side by side without mixing in the atmosphere! Jesse says it looks "like a dancefloor", and it makes Tayla think of "the internet connection on Miss Driver's computer" (it certainly spends a lot of time spinning around like a rainbow disk!).

Term 3, Week 7

Thanks to all for another wicked week – we’re starting to feel the creep of end of term fatigue in Room 3, so well done to all students for soldiering on with our learning and maintaining such high work standards. Over the next three weeks (particularly with swimming coming on in one week’s time!) please do make the call each night on whether homework or sleep is going to be more important for your families :) 

We had a lot of fun playing with oil, water, and alkaseltser tablets this week in Room 3 – there is nothing like a glass full of coloured bubbles to get us excited! As scientists, we are practising five key skills; asking questions, making predictions, conducting investigations or experiments, carefully observing the results, and sharing our ideas about our observations and learning with others. We are really enjoying learning about tikanga maori through myths and legends, and exploring the design details in our draft landscape paintings. We can also talk about the days of week and the weather in te reo maori, and this week we’ll be learning the colours to support our art lessons! This week we also move on to telling the time when it is half past, quarter past, and quarter to – and we are really enthusiastic about telling the time in Room 3, so please help us to practise at home :) 

Mrs Clare Corcoran will be teaching in Room 3 this Thursday as Miss Driver will be on an Enviroschools bus trip to Blenheim to check out some of the latest local action projects.

Once again, a reminder to pay swimming fees to the office, and to return swimming assessment forms so that the children can be correctly grouped when they begin lessons next week :) Also,  a reminder please to ensure all uniform items are named, and to practise the quick clothing change (including shoes and managing inside-out items!) :) 

Maths discovery time

We always enjoy discovery time with our maths materials - we love getting creative building and designing new creations...

Term 3, Week 6

We were so sad to farewell Miss Giraud on Friday, but we had a great time making our beautiful spring mural so do come and look at our finger-painted daffodils, sheep and blossom tree (you might also see our rainbows showing the spectrum of primary and secondary colours we have learned to mix!). You will spot some clouds in our sky full of sunshine, and on these clouds you can read about our early learning for our energy topic, looking at where energy comes from and how plants create sugars (photosynthesis) for animals to eat (and how animals also get eaten!). Our ideas about the other chemical processes in the food chain (digestion, metabolism and decomposition) are all written up in our writing and topic books.

During the rest of the term we’ll move on to exploring the nature of chemistry and the material world beyond the context of the food chain, in order to practise problem solving like scientists. This week we’re going to make some predictions about the differences between oil and water, and conduct some experiments to test our ideas, finishing up with some classroom lava lamps on Thursday. We’ll be writing up our predictions and observations, so take a look in our books or ask us about our learning!  In art we’ll use our painting skills in a new context, exploring the landscapes shown in illustrated Maori myths and legends. We’ll copy some of the patterns and designs we see, and then develop our patterns to build elements of the natural world – earth, water, fire and air. In maths we now begin to think about time, building our word bank, ordering the days of the week in both english and te reo maori, and reading the time – to the hour – on an analogue clock face (so no more tricking us about our bedtimes :)).

A further reminder to pay swimming fees to the office, and to return swimming assessment forms so that the children can be correctly grouped when they begin lessons in Week 8 :)