Chinese New Year Part 2.

Thank you to Caely (Samuel's mum) for coming in today to talk to Room 12 about Chinese New Year.  We learnt about the delicious food and exciting fire crackers.  Rm 12 enjoyed listening to Caely retell the story of Nian.  We also learnt about the delicious cake called Nian.  It is named after the dragon that we read about earlier in the week.

 
                Nian Cake

Richard Scholes: The Magical World of Crazy Science

Tawa School was lucky to have a visit from Richard Scholes and the Magical World of Crazy Science today.  All of the students were entertained, surprised and delighted by the experiments that Richard did.  From making elephant toothpaste and giant bubbles to flying toilet paper and absorbent nappies!  There was a lot of laughter in the hall today and maybe even some newly inspired scientists at Tawa School.  To help with your child's oral language skills it would be great if you could show them the photos and ask them to explain to you what is happening.

Chinese New Year

Today in Room 12 we talked about Chinese New Year.  We listened to a story about the dragon called Nian.  We learnt why people who celebrate Chinese New Year use fire crackers and the colour red.  Rm 12 then had a go at making their own Nian dragon.  Over the next few weeks we will be looking at different festivals and celebrations from around the world.  Please let us know if there is a festival or celebration that you have in your family that you would like to share with us.

Graphs and Tally Charts Part 2

We have been working very hard in Room 12 over the last two weeks. We have been learning how to collect information and transfer information into graphs. This is so that we can make sense of the information around us. Today we decided to have a go at tallying M & M's and then we put the information that we had gathered into a bar graph.

Graphs and tally charts

We started this year off by doing our maths strand for the term, statistics. We've been learning to make bar graphs and pictographs, and reading graphs to find out information. We've been using phrases like "more than" and "less than" to help us understand the data in a graph.

We've graphed how many letters are in our names, what colour or pattern our sunhats are, and our eye colours. Can you see what eye colour is most common?

Flying high part two

This has been a very busy week of hot air balloon stories, art, technology and a great poem to finish it off. On Friday we gave the students some newspaper, iceblock sticks, bits of wool, cotton wool and sellotape, and asked them to build a hot air balloon to float a character to the ground. We talked about what parts we would need, discussed that we could make more of a parachute shape, and let students choose who they worked with. Some children chose to work alone, but most worked in groups of three.

Gym helpers?

Hi everyone. This is just a very quick note to ask if anyone can help us with walking to the gym on Monday at 11am. It's a ten minute walk down the road, the gym instructors will run our session, and we'll head back to school at 12.30. We need four or five helpers to get us all down there and you can go grab a coffee while we exercise if you like! We have one helper we know about so far.

If you can help us out this Monday or every second week, please email us at ballen@tawa.school.nz or bkirkman@tawa.school.nz or leave a comment here.

On that note, I've been told some people are having problems leaving comments on the blog. If it's not working with you, please email us and let us know.

Thanks!

Flying High

We are flying high in Room 12, so today we had a hot air balloon focus (which will continue throughout the week). We read "Barney Malloon's Balloon" all together, drew hot air balloons and wrote stories about where we would go if we were in a hot air balloon. We also sang this fun song together!

Portraits

Look at all of the beautiful portraits that Room 12 created this week.  We took photos of the students and then they created a mirror image.  The students used pencil, pastel and dye.  They are currently up in Room 12 if you would like to take a look.  Don't they look wonderful!

Dragon stories

On Wednesday our writing lesson was writing letters about what we were looking forward to or hoping to do this year in Room 12. The students didn't have an awful lot to say about that, so a lot of our writing didn't get past "Dear Becca and Brenda"...! On Thursday, we decided to shake it up a bit and Brenda got everyone to think about this picture:

All ready to go!

The blog has now been made private, meaning only parents and relatives of children in our class are able to access it. If you have a family member who would like to see the blog, please email Becca (ballen@tawa.school.nz) with their email address, or comment below. We can now use pictures of kids on the blog, but if you would prefer that your child's face isn't shown then just let us know. Only first names will be used.

First day

We had a great first day in Room 12 today. Thanks to everyone for your energy and enthusiasm! The day flew by and was over before we knew it.

We started off with a whole school assembly to welcome our new students, then organised and labelled all our stationery. Everyone did such a good job and saved us a lot of work! We had a rainy morning tea but the students cleaned the classroom so well. People are doing a great job of looking after our new room. We did a worksheet about us, learnt about how we read to ourselves, and worked in small groups to brainstorm how Room 12 kids act at school.

Everyone loved using the different furniture, especially the cushions and clipboards. Well done everyone and see you tomorrow for another fantastic day!

Work in progress

This is what the classroom looked like less than two weeks ago. Tomorrow it will be not only finished, set up, and tidy, but full of kids. Looking forward to our first day in such an awesome space!

Testing 1, 2, 3

Welcome to our new blog! We're just figuring out how this all works so please be patient with us.