Baking Cupcakes 🧁

This week we thought it would be a great idea to utilise cooking in our writing and maths practice. We did this through baking cupcakes! Measurement and and fraction techniques were used whilst baking the cupcakes, and then students wrote about the experience of baking.

The best part about this was that the students all then got to enjoy the delicious cupcakes they worked so hard on!

Te Reo Māori

Our Te Reo lessons have been a true highlight recently! This week we revisited our work on the numbers in Māori, introducing ourselves, the person next to us, and our parents. 

We have utilised fun games to help us in our learning, for example we would spread ourselves around the classroom, and on a clap have to find the person closest to us, tell them our name and the names of our parents. We would then introduce the person next to us to the rest of the class.

What am I? Using details in writing to give clues

 How do we describe an animal in detail by giving lots of clues? We have been writing 'What am I?' descriptions of some animals we know and sharing them with each other. This has given us an opportunity to describe an animal while thinking about what information our audience needs to have.

 Here are some examples of our writing. Can you guess which animal it is?

My secret animal is light blue and lives in the sea. It is as big as a house. It eats plankton and is my second favourite animal.

My secret animal it has flippers and a long tail. Its teeth are scary and sharp. By Otis

How do superheroes tackle challenges? They use Grit!

In Tautoru, we have been inquiring into the characteristics of superheroes this term. We know that they help people and sometimes they have superpowers. But they are also faced with challenges to overcome. You will have seen our focus on learning about and developing Grit across the school this year and the question we have been focusing on is: How do superheroes use grit? How might we use it for our challenges, too?

We started by thinking about what is a challenge for us. Everyone had lots of different ideas, which means that sometimes challenges can be very personal and different for each of us.

To learn about how we can develop grit we have tried sketching. This is a big challenged because it's all about making mistakes and keep practising. We spend time sketching shells inside and sketching outside. We had t focus on detail and draw different types of lines.

Now we are preparing some superhero comics and that will show how we can use grit to overcome challenges in different situations.

Celebrating Sea Week!

 We celebrated Sea Week by sharing some of the things we love about the sea. We brought special sea treasures and books from home to share, and used our discovery space to spark our imagination. Sea Week has given us lots of opportunities to extend our learning!

We spent time sketching shells, paying close attention to the lines we could see.

                                                     

We also read Celia the Seagull, by Nicole Miller,  and learned about the problems that pollution is causing to the sea creatures. This story gave us more ideas to add to our writing. 

We wrote about the different animals we love and how the sea is special to us. We wrote about the sea throughout the week, aiming to describe our ideas using conjunctions (and, so, then, because, if, but) to make our sentences longer. Here are a few examples.

Sarah Lang Visit!

We have been so lucky today to be able to meet Sarah Laing.  Author and Cartoonist.  She demonstrated some of her cartoon drawing skills that we are now trying out in our own cartoon books. 

She talked to us about how to show different expressions on our cartoon faces.

We also had a go during the demonstration. 

Here is an example of how we have used our new skills.  

Watch this space for more exciting writing and cartoons.   

Inquiry- Using our superpowers to learn about Friendship.

How do we get to know new people? How do we learn to be good friends? What Character Strength Superpowers can help us? These are some of the questions we have been investigating.

Learning to be a good friend requires different superpowers and we have been investigating what that means. We learned that character strengths like Teamwork, Kindness, Social Intelligence and Self-Regulation are important so that we can grow our friendship circles.

We did some beautiful friendship art to show our ideas. We drew different ways that we will show our character strengths and be good friends to one another. We made friendship Koru!