Interzone Athletes

This morning we farewells our interzone athletes as they prepared to do their best against children from schools right across the Hutt Valley.
We are looking forward to hearing of their successes during the morning.

Straight back into it!

We have been back at school for fewer than three hours, and already we are running around learning new skills. We have training and tournaments from players at Lower Hutt Football Club this week.
Look out for news from camp over the next few days.

e-Learning - Have your say!

Please complete this form to help us make good decisions about our e-Learning.

http://makingconnections-linkingdigitally.wikispaces.com/STUDENT+SURVEY

GCC Link

Here is the link to record your steps (year Fives only).

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AjyAdKksix5JdDB5Q0RYbTBxblc3U3I2UXhHVEhkOVE#gid=0

Learning how to find factors

Caleb created this mini-lesson to demonstrate using the strategy of doubling and halving to find factors.

Do you think he created a fabulous and helpful lesson? Leave a comment to let our class know.

Digital Story-telling aka Virtual Reality?

Welcome back to our last term of school in 2012.

This term we are going to focus on bringing our ICT skills together in the form of digital storytelling. The children have been writing about their holidays, and using google docs and google presentations, as well as the App of Puppet Pals to illustrate their writing. Check out the photos below. If you have missed out on a photo opportunity - never fear! Your child is quite happy to create their own memory. 

 Look at this dare devil! What an awesome swing.

 Is this Alice in Wonderland?

 Ooh! That lamb is so cute? How did she manage to get up so close?

 Wow! These girls had at the whole cinema to themselves!

Look at these two and their beautiful horse - and on their own piece of paradise!

Finishing Fair Testing

Wow! What a great topic this has been. The children have been fabulously engaged - asking amazing questions, designing new experiments, as well as conducting precise tests. Well done, everyone.
To complete our work we sorted the experiments we had conducted into Fair Tests - those with variables we altered - and what we described as Experimental Tests. The children were very impressive in their knowledge.
Look for some great explanation writing appearing on blogs soon.

Our Fabulous Science Evening

Survey on our use of pink and green to highlight what we have done well and what we could improve

Wow! What speed

Look at the speed of this bat!

We have enjoyed some expert cricket coaching this afternoon. Perfect after a wet lunch time.

Science Evening

We have very excited scientists in Room 8 at present. The Science Evening is on next Wednesday evening. We hope you can come along.
The children are going to dress up as stereotypical scientists - apologies to any scientists out there. They just need a white shirt or old white tee-shirt that they are allowed to draw on to make it look like a lab coat.

Today we saw a blob bottle being created. Ask your child to describe what they observed.

The Marble Run

We conducted another fair test today. We selected two marbles that had just one variable - size. e rolled the marbles down a ramp to find out if the larger or smaller marble was faster. Do you know which one was faster?

Understanding Fair Testing and Variables

Les Mills School of Fitness

Relating to Others - Sharing (Our Key Competency focus this week)

Looking Forward to a Great Term

After two weeks of holidays, we were straight back into 'it' on Monday. It was lovely to see everyone and hear stories about what they did during the holidays.

For the first few weeks of the term we are looking at the Olympics: events, countries, traditions, competitors, history, etc. We are also trying to integrate our measurement and statistics into our work. What a great opportunity to talk about distance events in swimming, cycling and athletics! We will also be looking at recording time, reading the time, calendars, weights, which countries are winning medals, etc. Next week I am planning a special surprise that has something 'connected' (expect to see some different spellings of this word) to the Olympics! Hmm!

In week three we start our swimming at Huia Pool. After that we focus on our Science topic.

This term in maths there is also a big focus on basic facts. Several groups of children will have more intensive work and I'm hoping to see some big improvements. The pictures of apps below was just a visual guide for parents wanting to load them onto devices. Sorry Harry - it wasn't a live connection.

Thanks for the feedback about this week's Home Learning. Again, our focus will be on measurement and basic facts, with spelling. The children know that reading regularly is also an expectation.

Remember that you can look at your child's portfolio at any time. More items are added by the children during the week. Please add your comments to your child's work by selecting the 'comments' button.

I look forward to see in you all during the term.

New Apps for Maths

Apparently there has been a flurry of purchases of an IT nature during the holidays. Here are a couple of maths apps that your child may like if they need to practise fast and fluent addition and subtraction. The first is free and the second one costs $1.29 (I think).