Holt Planetarium Visit

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Replica model of the space shuttle!

Today Room 5 and Room 6 went to the Holt Planetarium in Napier. We got to view the night sky in extreme detail, guided by the amazing Mr Sparks. My favourite things under the dome were learning more about the significance of the Southern Cross and seeing exactly where all the planets and constellations are in the sky at the moment. The night sky is like a calendar.

I also loved the chance just to lean back and gaze at the night sky and get pointed out super cool stuff! Earlier, we watched an amazing video of NASA astronauts in space. It showed us some very amusing effects of being zero gravity.

I would strongly recommend a visit to the Hawke's Bay Holt Planetarium. Sunday evening is family night.

Matariki Workshops

Matariki from Kieren Moriarty on Vimeo.

Yesterday, Tōtara Hub enjoyed a day of Matariki workshops. A huge thank you to Yvette Hardaker and her amazing volunteers who made this day happen. Wow!

I was lucky enough to wander around the workshops and capture some of the learning action on video. The video above is part one, look out for part two soon!

Here is a Padlet which reflects Room 6's thoughts on what they learnt yesterday.

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What is Matariki?

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Today we had a shared reading of the short information text, Matariki by Moira Wairama. Our Padlet shows what we now know about Matariki after reading this text. Many of us would like to find out more.

Designing a new swimming pool

The rich task - key tricky word - compound shape!

Today, we did self assessment of where we thought we were on our rich task progression. It was a tough rich task and us teachers had many debates on ways to work it out.

Room 6 assessed what we could do well and what our next steps in learning are. Click on the cluttered notes on our Padlet and you can scroll through which each student wrote.

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Can I get back to you on that?

Today, we read the last two chapters of Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key by Jack Gantos. Here are our thoughts on the book and our favourite parts. Can we get back to you on that?

 

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Here is a Lego stop motion video created by an American student about the book. We have enjoyed watching this in class.

 

What is Culture?

We have a new topic this term. We are learning to explore and communicate through the arts. To do this we are learning about different cultural practises. We will be appreciating the arts of other cultures as well as our own. Yesterday, we asked "what is culture?". After lots of discussion and a little research, our learning buddies came up with these suggestions.
 

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I Infer...

Today, we discussed the reading strategy of inferring or making inferences. It means reading between the lines to wok out hidden meanings in the text. You need to combine good thinking with clues in the text and your own prior knowledge. We had a go making inferences from descriptive sentences using Padlet. I think the students did very well! Here are our first two examples.

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Action Verbs

Zeb leaps Justice's spinning rope!

Today we started to work with our year two buddy class, Room 5 Kidd-Li-Winks on creating our own angry verbs (idea from our pen pal class Room 121 in the USA). This blog post has the first stage in the process.

Firstly, we read a quick book about verbs. Then using a variety of P.E. gear, we acted out sporting actions with our buddies. As it was happening, we discussed present, past and future tenses for our verbs. We also came up with many more verbs bacause of all the unplanned actions which were involved.

Here is our Padlet showing some of our verbs.




Photo Set:


What verbs can you see in the photos? Tell us in the comments section!

Pen Pal #1 2013

Today our pen pal letters arrived from our great buddy class in the USA, Room 121!

This Padlet / Wallwisher has our favourite parts of our letters. Add to our wall if you like. Click on a message and then you can scroll through them to read all the post it notes.

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We were so excited, as you can see from the photos below :) Pen pals are great! What do you think?

Photos by Olivia. 

Swimming Sports Reflections

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