Room 15 2017

Introducing Room 15

Term 1 - 2017 

Room 15 is a new entrance classroom and is made up of many fun, hardworking, caring and thoughtful students. We try to reflect our SPARK values in our classroom and around the rest of the school and we love to learn new things each day. We enjoy working together as a team on different challenges! We are making progress in Reading, Writing and Math and we really enjoy learning in other curriculum areas like the arts, technlogy and science. Drama, art with Mrs Bier and music are some of our favourite activities. Dancing in jump jam and riding the bikes are also some of the things we love doing at school. We always try to encourage each other and not give up even when school is tricky. Take a look at some pictures of the different learning we have been doing. 

 

Our Buddy Class

We really enjoy having Room 11 (year 5&6) as our buddy class. On Friday after assembly, Room 11 children come and read to us. We love it because we get to hear some cool stories, we get to know older children around the school who we can look out for at playtimes and we get to see what reading looks like when we are older. 

 

In Room 15 we show sustainability by putting our rubbish in the right place. We have a landfil bucket, a compost/worm farm bucket and a paper recycling bucket. Every day we put our food scraps into the compost/worm farm bucket. Look how big the juicy the worms are now! We did some fantastic writing about the worms at RRS. Have a look in our Language books. 

 
In Strand Math we have been looking at the volume and capacity of different objects. We went to the sandpit to explore how much sand could fit into different containers. We ordered them from biggest to smallest by tipping the sand from one to another.
We also filled different containers with water.
To see which ones held more water we put a few drops of blue food colouring in each container. When we filled them with water we noticed some were light blue and some were still quite dark. We knew that the ones with the more concentrated color must have less volume because they were so concentrated, whereas the light ones were very diluted.
Some things are heavy and some things are light! Little things can sometimes weigh more than big things! We discovered the best way to move heavy objects is by using teamwork.
We went out to the Harakeke Flax Bush on the field to collect seeds for planting new plants. The seeds are little and black and oval shaped. We thought they looked like shiny paper, seaweed, coffee beans and little bugs. We watched them spin (helicopter) when Mrs Gunning dropped them.
The tiny seeds are kept safe inside these pods until they're ready to be planted. The pods get dry and open up and then we can take out the seeds!
This is what the seeds look like. We put them in an envelope to dry for a week or so.
Yay! Go Room 15 for having excellent attendance this week... resulting in us winning the overall cup and prize. We love the toys in the box!
 
 
 

Goodbye Eason! Have fun in Singapore with your family and take some pictures to show us! We can't wait to see you again in Term 2. 

 

Guess what's in the bag?!

We made ICE CREAM on Friday after reading "The Giant's Ice Cream" by Jill Eggleton. 

It was lots of fun and we thought it was delicious. You can try it at home too, here's how... 

What you need:

  • 300ml cream
  • 2 tbsp castor sugar
  • 1 tsp vanilla essence
  • 2 trays of ice cubes
  • 6 tbsp rock salt
  • 1 medium sized ziploc bag
  • 1 large sized ziploc bag
  • tea towel or oven mitts

Method:

Step 1: Place the cream, sugar and vanilla into the medium sized ziploc bag and combine the ingredients.  Be sure to zip up the bag securely first.

Step 2: Place the ice into the larger ziploc bag.   

Step 3: Spoon the salt over the top of the ice in the larger ziploc bag.

Step 4: Place the medium bag containing the cream mixture inside the larger bag on top of the ice and salt and zip up the bag securely.

Step 5: Shake and massage the bag for five to ten minutes or until the mixture becomes the consistency of ice cream. 

Step 6: You might like to wrap the bag in a tea towel or wear oven mitts while you’re shaking as it can get quite cold!  It’s also a good idea to do this part outside as the water can drip out of the bag as the ice begins to melt.

Step 7: Once ready, remove the bag of ice cream and give it a wipe to remove the salt from the outside of the bag.

Step 8: You now have your own homemade ice cream.

Step 9:  You can snip a hole in a corner of the bag and squeeze out the icecream into a bowl or cone or simply grab a spoon and start eating straight from the bag!

 
 
 
 

"YUM! We love ice cream!" 

 

Bike Riding

We really enjoy riding the bikes! On Friday after lunch we get to ride the bikes around the school. It's important that we wear covered shoes to protect our feet and toes, and helmets to keep our brains safe. We are learning about balancing, steering and braking. Here are some pictures of us having fun! 

 
 
 
 

 

Thanks to KidsCan we all have lovely new raincoats to keep us warm and dry. Everybody in Room 15 has a jacket and they have been labeled with your child's name. Thanks KidsCan! 

 
 

Welcome back to school for Term 2 everyone! 

Hope you all had a relaxing and enjoyable break and are ready to do some more learning. There are children joining our class all the time which is wonderful and we are off to a busy start already. This term we are looking at CYCLES - all sorts of different cycles, so have a chat to your child about the cycles they know of. For example, weather cycles, season cycles and life cycles. 

On Mondays we are going to do a perceptual motor program to increase children's confidence and motor skill levels. This helps with all areas of their learning. Here is Sarullah scooting along on his tummy on a wheelie board, weaving in and out of cones using his hands. 

 

 

 

Half way through Term 3 already?!

We have been doing some awesome learning in Room 15 this term and last week we celebrated book week! It was a fun-filled week, jam-packed with amazing reading, crafts and finished off with a character parade. Room 15 read Dr Suess's "Horton Hears a Who" which we loved. Horton is such an amazing, caring and friendly elephant who showed Aroha to everybody. "A person's a person, no matter how small!" ... is what he said. We made some art and did some writing to go with it - check it out, it's on our wall! We also listened to others techers come and read to us, and guessed who the mystery reader was everyday! We even won the prize for guessing the mystery reader one day! To get ready for the character parade we made elephant ear and trunk masks and of course a speck of dust to hold. We looked INCREDIBLE and won the prize for best dressed class! See for yourself...