Room 1 farewell Kaia this week as he moves away with his family to Clyde. We wish him all the best at his new school and will miss his cheery good mornings and happy face in our classroom. We are big on learning goals towards positive relationships at the moment. Our theme this week is 'have reasons for the things we say and do'. This makes us stop and ask ourselves how the activities we do in class help our learning and help us to make good choices towards achieving our goals. Cerificates: Kaia Nelson for great reading progress and Poppy O'Keefe pushing 4 sounds together to make words. Great stuff! Here are some of our Pet Day photos. Enjoy our Pet Day recounts in our published stories this weekend.

Our Community - Playing together, Working together

We are excited to be learning how to play cooperatively with others through games and use these skills to work together to create and express our ideas through the arts. Some will choose drama, music, dance or visual arts to do this and we will share our results with you later in the term.

We are excited to be learning how to play cooperatively others through games and use these skills to work together to create and express our ideas through the arts. Some will choose drama, music, dance or visual arts to do this and we will share our results with you later in the term. Here are some photos of us 'tuning in' to the inquiry. We had an 'arty party' in the junior syndicate and rotated around the classrooms to experience a taste of each arts discipline. "Rock Painting was cool" said Room 1. Can you tell what shapes we are making in drama? (CLUE: Giraffe, snake, dragon, dinosaur, elephant, whale, and kiwi.)

Room 1 have been videoing our learning to show off what we know about how change happens using a basic scientific process - predict, test, observe and discover. We are looking forward to presenting it to you next Wednesday night. We are using the last 2 weeks of term to investigate 'bugs' and will come home with all sorts of interesting facts on this topic. All children have reading and spelling homework daily. Just focus on 5 or 6 tricky words from the spelling lists by practicing them in the spelling notebooks. Most children have basic facts homework - I suggest 5 a night to spread it across the week. Thanks for your support.

Check out two of our mad scientists and their discoveries.....

Our inquiry into how and why matter changes is well under way. We have been looking at trends and patterns that occur with freezing and melting, mixing things that fizz up to create gas, and discovering what happens when we apply heat to our ingredients. Watch this space as we are about to use these patterns to generate our own experiments.

Nifty Narratives

Room 1 have been learning to write imaginary narratives. We know that they are written to entertain our audience and that they should include a problem and a solution. We have also been working on adding some descriptions to characters to make our stories interesting. We hope you enjoy our published work that comes home this weekend.

Dad is sleeping in his bed. Wake up said the kids.

By Jake August 2011

The children can’t get the gold key because the key was stuck on the hook. A kid pulled and pulled. He hit his head. They called 111. The Police and the Ambulance and the fire engine came. He went to hospital.

By Lydia August 2011

Once upon a time there was a fish. It had no friends so it found a big blue whale. The little blue fish said to the big blue whale. “Will you be my friend”. “Yes” said the big blue whale. So they played all night.

By Addisyn August 2011

Dad is sleeping in his bed.

By Kaia August 2011

Dad is sleeping in his bed.

By Sarah August 2011

Dad is sleeping in his bed.

By Poppy O’Keefe August 2011

The setting is in the air and the person was wearing armor. And the person wearing armor couldn’t fly. But it ate some cabbage and then he could fly. And it could!

By Mitchell August 2011

Dad is sleeping in his bed. Wake up said the kids.

By Logan August 2011

There was a bear and the bear could not find a home but the bear found a home! And he got in and he lived happily ever after. He called his Grandma and his Grandma came to him and the Grandma brang him home.

By Aiden August 2011

Once upon a time there was a pirate who lived on a ship. The pirate couldn’t find treasure. Finally the pirate found gold. The setting is an island. He needed a shovel. He stepped on something hard. It is the gold! The pirate lived happily ever after. The end.

By Fletcher August 2011

Once upon a time there was a Princess. She was stuck up the castle. A magic queen said “put up your hair”. A wizard broke the stairs. Now I can’t get down from the castle. “Help me!” said the Queen. And a builder came to make some new stairs so the daughter lived happily ever after.

By Sacha August 2011

Once there lived a beast in the forest. He got caught up in the spiders web but he bit the spider web. He got out.

By Jack August 2011

Once upon a time there was a sword stuck in a rock. One day a person came along to get the sword out. He was impressed. He went home to get his armor. He came back to get the sword out but he couldn’t get it out. The next day he tried again and he got it out! Because he had a sleep. The next day he felt stronger and that was the end of that.

By Ethan August 2011

The beast couldn’t fly because the birds are in the way. The snake jumped up to the birds and he went down and he will walk there to get his food and that was the goodest part ever.

By Sam August 2011

100 days at school!

Today we celebrated 100 days at school. It has been SO powerful for our learning about place value and groups of 10. We can all skip count in 10's and some of know there are 7 lots of 10 and 4 left over in the number 74! Each day for the past 100 school days we have placed a marble in the jar so it has been quite a journey. We had a great shared lunch to celebrate, along with a lollie scramble with 100 lollies! We also farewelled Marcus who is moving with his family to Christchurch. All the best Marcus. Reading books are coming home for the holidays on Friday along with a stationery list for replenishing our stocks. Have a great holiday. Certificates on Friday were Addisyn for knowing her phone number and address, Ethan for 100% in spelling, and Eliza for great counting on from the biggest number in maths. Great work!

Police Education

We had Mr Herrick come to our classroom and teach us some valuable lessons about keeping safe when we cross the road. Ask your child to tell you some of the messages they learnt. Add these words to our 'answer garden' below. It is a way to record the learning they can recall. The more the message is entered - the bigger the words become. We are also getting really good at knowing our name, address and phone number to use in case of emergency.Certificates at last weeks assembly were awarded to Sarah Hay for a fantastic start to her school days, and to Mitchell Gowers for great displays of Kotahitanga - 'getting along with his classmates' so well.

how do you cross the road safely?... at AnswerGarden.ch.

Our Hazard Hunt

Room 1 have been spending time this week on the look out for potential hazards around our school. Once they found their hazard they had to come up with a plan to make it safer for the other children at Myross Bush School.
Keep a look out for our writing about what we found and what we did to help alleviate the hazards.
Here we are on our hunt.

Safety Matters!

We have been inquiring into how to keep ourselves safe and have been identifying potential hazards and what to do about them. Here are some of the things the children discovered we can do when in danger. Ronald McDonald helped us learn about road safety and we have even had a session on first aid. Look out Mr Lovelock as Room 1 have been on a hazard hunt around the school and letters and emails are coming your way with some suggestions on how to avoid potential disasters - like signs for staying out of the mud puddles!

Celebration of our culture

In New Zealand we have some unique ways of greeting each other - one way is saying our name, our parents names, our grandparents and our place of origin, including how we arrived in New Zealand and the mountain and water we identify with. All are ways of sharing with a group 'who we are', valuing our past and helping individuals to have a firm sense of belonging. Room 1 children have videoed each other saying the beginning of their mihi as part of their inquiry into their culture.

Room 8 Helping With Comic Life and Blogging

Today some kids from room 8 came to help us with comic life and using our blog .

Swimming!

We have already made big jumps in our swimming skills in just a few weeks. I think it helps that our buddies are all going for it so we give new things a go too. Here are some shots of us splashing around. Check out our stories we wrote to go with them.

iPad in Room 1!

We have an iPad in our classroom for the week and are enjoying finding ways for it to support our learning. We are creating a PMI (click here) chart to record our findings. (P=positives, M=minuses, I=Interesting points) and plan on writing persuasively to Mr Lovelock to get one in every classroom if our predictions that it will be a versatile, child size, easy to use, motivational tool to help meet our goals, are right! Watch this space for our findings!

Welcome to the parents, whanau and friends of the super-kids in Room1 for 2011. We have had a fantastic start to the year with team teaching happening between Mrs Forde and Mrs Polaschek while numbers build to open Room 2. We are beginning to look at a study of 'who we are'. A follow on from our last years topic 'where are we?' which explored space and where we fit into the scheme of things. To kick off our topic Room 1 ask that you pop an answer to our question below to help us explore what makes us unique as New Zealanders.

Who Are We?

We are New Zealanders. What makes us special?... at AnswerGarden.ch.