More learning in week 5

Week 5:

We have had a fun week in Harakeke this week, as we have started our inquiry into water. Lots of interesting ideas have come up about where we get our water from and what it does. We are all working on finding a wonder question that we would like to inquire into. Here are some of the students 'wonder questions' that are raining down from the ceiling!!!!! (not scientifically correct I know) 

We are getting started on our spelling programmer where the students have been doing their spelling both at home and in class. Their mission was to fill up the whole table in their various spelling words during reading time, before it was time to change to the next rotation on the star. This group worked particularly hard and were the first group to successfully cover the whole table top! well done! they look very thrilled! 

 Awesome work team!!!!!

Our beach trip!

Thank you to everyone who helped out on our beach trip on Friday. 

It is fair to say all the kids and myself had a brilliant time! 

Educational and fun, even us adults learnt a thing or two! 

It was such a great and valuable experience for the students to have! 

Here are a couple of snaps from the day!

Week 2 and 3

Swimming sport! 

We had an awesome time last Friday at swimming sports. 

Harakeke displayed their best swimming skills and we were all very proud.

 It was also great to see so many parents coming to support their learners! 

We have been working hard with our maths already this term and we are smiling about it! Great to see!

Here is our treaty that we have all signed. The students came up with these on their own and we discussed and agreed upon them as a class. 

We are all SO excited for the beach trip tomorrow and we can't wait to learn many things about safety in the ocean! 

Harakeke 2016

It is right back into it for term 1 2016 at school. 

It has been great to welcome many fresh faces into Harakeke this year plus having some of our last year Harakeke faces staying on with us as year 3's. 

We also welcome two new students to Harakeke who have arrived here from different schools. It is a pleasure to have them join us on our learning journey. 

Our classroom is set up so the students have choice as to where they work. They can choose to sit at desks, tables, on the floor, on pillows, the couch or lean on a chair, as they go about their independent activities. 

Together we have co-constructed our learning treaty in Harakeke where we all agree how we behave and go about our learning. All the students have "Signed" the treaty by creating their own personal figure to stand beside it. 

(picture to come)

Term 4

Straight back into it this term:

starting with calendar art, 

pet and flower day

 and the cultural food festival.  

We all loved pet and flower day! The students will be bringing home their 

writing recount on their experience on pet and flower day, in their achievement books!

Sad new, our other beloved fish Silvey, past away during the holidays. So we 

have now replaced the fish tank with a pot plant, 

that I hope I will have better luck keeping alive.. 

For the Cultural Food Festival, we have been making 

Ula Lole - which are Samoan lolly necklaces given to people on special occasions. We all had so much fun making these and Kome did a great job as our co-demonstrator! 

Term 3! WOW!

Welcome back to school everyone!TERM 3 ALREADY!

We have had a great kick start to the term, with the students itching to share their holiday news and jump back into learning. 

We have had slight changes to our reading rotations and our writing program which will allow learning with other students in our class, rather than just the ones reading at the same level as ourselves. 

We are starting the term with a mini-unit on the movie Inside Out!
I went to see this in the holidays and loved it. Physiologists are claiming that this film is very
valuable to children and their growing understanding of their emotions and how to identify them and control them. We are doing work about the feeling of Joy, Sadness, Angry, Fear and Disgust, which are all characters we meet in the movie that are the 'little voices inside our head'. We have already had a great classroom discussion about times that evoke these feelings, and when they take over our 'feelings console' (seen in the picture).

There is no pressure to see the movie, but it is highly recommended. :)

learning, learning and more learning!

Welcome Teddy into our class to join Olaf and Lamb Chops!

 They make our learning fun and imaginative. We have loved giving Teddy big cuddle and we have been learning lots about how to respect the things in our classroom and how lucky we are to have them. 

We have been doing lots of hard work on our multiplication! We have been using our handy whiteboard tables to practice our skip counting and applying this to our learning of our 2, 5 and 10 times tables. Remember we don't want to be reciting the whole list, but visualizing it in our heads so it becomes "instant recall". Some great thinking going on in our class! 

Here we are working on using repeated addition to figure out an equation. understanding how the 'x' in the equation means 'lots/groups of' so we can draw this on the table and visualize it in our heads, to see how we got the answer.