Week 7 and 8

Wow, can you believe we are already in week 8!

As we near the end of term 1 I am so proud of how much the class has achieved already so far this year!

The last 2 weeks have seen us very busy with lots of visitors of the human and animal variety.  First we had Ashlee kindly bring in her lovely kitten, followed by Mia with her extremely friendly guinea pig. The children loved learning about how to care for the animals and getting to pat them was great excitement.

Today we welcomed Jenny Gray into our room for the second time. She is working with the children and our teacher to develop our learning in P4C. P4C stands for Philosophy for children. It is a way of teaching that encourages and develops the children's questioning and reasoning skills. It helps the children to reflect on their skills, and look at how they could improve their thinking and questioning techniques.

More information can be found here: http://www.p4c.org.nz/

During maths Rich Tasks this week we were faced with the following word problem-

If there are 9 raspberries and 4 apples in 1 pie how many apples and raspberries would i need to make 5 pies?

It was interesting to see the various way each pair were trying to solve the problem. The children used a number of key competencies while working with their partner and the 30 minute lesson soon became and hour.

The children were able to verbalise some of their ideas and show that they were using lots of different strategies when working with the numbers. We will be exploring this more over the year so feel free to practice these types of questions at home. .

Key Competency Video featuring room 12 students

This is the link to a short video featuring room 12!

https://vimeo.com/209314068

Details for free lunch

If your children require the Angels link for free lunches please check out detail below:

Learning to use Place Value Houses

This week during Math we have been looking at place value. We have been using place value houses to help us identify the value of numbers with up to 3 digits. The children were able to name how many hundredths, tens and ones within a given number up to 1000. The children really enjoyed playing a new game where they had to compete against the other team to make a number up to 1000 using wooden and plastic place value blocks. They especially enjoyed the way Lynley gave them special names using 'Alliteration' Harry the Hurricane, Lightning bolt Lydia and O for Awesome Olivia were just a couple of examples of our new competitors names!

Discovery Time

Today in Discovery Time we had a fantastic time and everyone worked really hard on using their Key Competencies! We were working on relating well with each other, taking turns, sharing and using our thinking skills. The children were able to identify ways they displayed each key competency during our session. Well done everyone! We did some great Hungry Caterpillar inspired finger painting, celebrated St Patricks day by icing green biscuits, used forks to do print making on our leprechaun crafts and we explored how corn kernels transform using heat and steam into popcorn! "There must be a lot of pressure built up in the shell"-Malachi

Monster Adjectives

Today during writing time today we played a game in groups where we had to come up with as many adjectives to describe a picture shown to us. We had 60 seconds. The group with the most adjectives scored a point. The competition was intense! The pictures were of a volcano, an ice berg, a grizzly bear, and we finished with a monster. Following this we listened to a picture book from the 'story on line' website called Monsters Under my Bed. Next we used a planning sheet to brainstorm great adjectives to describe our own monster. The monsters looked incredible and we came up with many adjectives. We will use this planning sheet to write a character description over the next week. This is us working on our plan!

E- Newsletter

Recently our school has made changes to the way you can view our newsletter. This is now easier to access from all devices and also gives us the opportunity to share videos with you. We are hoping to reduce the amount of paper copies we are producing each week to help our environment and keep costs down. You can get our E-newsletter directly to your inbox and never miss a school update. Email: staff@nelsoncentral.school.nz to subscribe.

Welcome to week 5!

Welcome to week 5! Wow the term is whizzing by. Thanks to everyone who has responded to our requests for help at our working bee for the garden makeover. If you are yet to let me know if you can make it please drop me a quick email as soon as possible.