CLASSROOM HIGHLIGHTS

This month, Classroom Highlights reports come from Room 13 teacher Sara Olsen, and Year 6 teacher Rachael Shaw.

Room 13: Kia ora, Bula, Talofa, Gidday and welcome to Room 13.We are an Y1 classroom of 11 boys and 9 girls. Our Classroom is a learning zone. We know we come to school to learn and we are responsible for our own learning. We are enthusiastic learners who are focussed and we consistently try our best. In our learning zone we have rockets. Our rockets take us on our learning journey to the stars. We always try to stay in our learning rockets but sometimes asteroids try to intercept our journey and we can go off course. So we try to avoid those asteroids.

We are progressing well in our learning and there is always exciting things to see and experience. We loved the change concept as we were able to experiment with many different things. We were so fascinated with the milk and dye experiment. We put some milk on a plate and we put red, green and yellow dye into the corners of the milk. We then put a cotton bud into some washing detergent and slowly put the cotton bud into the middle of the plate.

We watched as the dyes started to mix together and they made really amazing patterns.

This term we are learning about our own culture as well as other cultures. It is so interesting learning about other people’s cultures and trying and experiencing new things. We have a cultural rotation with Room 10 and 27. Each week we celebrate a different culture. In our first rotation we celebrated the Maori culture. We heard the legend of the “Fish of Maui” and how Maui caught a big fish that became the North Island of New Zealand. We made Maori headbands and sang waiata’s. We made Maori bread which was yummy. We also learned E Papa with sticks.

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This past week we learned all about Kiwiana. New Zealand has so many unique things to celebrate. We have a special bird the “Kiwi”, we did some cool Kiwi artwork and we learned about a drink called ”L & P” which is world famous in New Zealand because it comes from a small place called “ Paeroa”. We made L & P scones, which were yummy. In our next cultural rotation we will be learning about the Indian culture.We welcome visitors to our classroom, please come and visit anytime. We would like to thank the board for all the support they give our school,Yours warmly,Mrs Sara Olsen and the lovely children of Room 13.

Room 19 Highlights: Room 19 has 31 students that are in full swing of a busy Term 3. Developing independence and becoming motivated learners has been a major focus within the class. The children have learnt that for them to be effective learners they must be able to ‘own’ the learning process. Therefore we have spent considerable time developing our goal setting and reflection skills. Children are expected to understand themselves as learners and be able to identify and use the traits of an effective learner. When asked the question, ‘what do great learners do?’ they were able to confidently give a variety of responses. These were some examples:Take risks, ask for help when needed, they demonstrate determination, believe in themselves, challenge themselves, accept failure, learn from their mistakes, reflect on their work and go back and improve it, use initiative, never give up, follow the success criteria, use knowledge for good, focus, go the extra mile, co-operate with others, give 100%, make connections with the learning, choose the risky path – not the safe path!, improve their skills, don’t settle for average, use imagination, be creative, they strive to understand, they put themselves on the path to awesomeness!

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The Culture concept has provided many exciting learning opportunities and allowed many of the children to share their expertise about their own culture and learn about other cultures around the world. A major skill focus has been to compare different

cultures with our own and the children have been fascinated by just how different other people around the world live their lives. We have also been developing our skill of writing open questions for inquiry. An extension of sharing about our own culture has been our Treasures Exhibition that they are excitedly preparing for the rest of the senior school to view. The

children were able to identify a range of family treasures and talk confidently about why they were valuable to them and their families. It was amazing what family history and precious treasures were unearthed as a result of this unit.

Writing has continued to be a major area of development this year and the class have been benefiting from some excellent professional learning in the area of using Assessment for Learning. We have consolidated our skills of identifying and using a range of success criteria to help

them become more successful in their writing. They are also developing the skills to self-assess against them. The ability of the children in Room 19 to talk about their learning and identify next steps has improved greatly. Having the children taking greater control of their own learning has been extremely beneficial. After identifying an overall weakness in our development of ideas through the use of exciting and precise vocabulary, we have been working really hard in class lessons to improve this writing trait.

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Mathex has had our heads reeling for the last few weeks as we have tried to get our heads around some pretty curly math problems. In groups of 4 the class have been becoming more proficient in putting much of their algebraic thinking skills into practice as well as transferring their other math knowledge into new and varied contexts. All the hard work paid dividends when one of our R19 teams won the Hill School Mathex competition and another one came 3rd equal. Well done teams. 7 of our class then continued onto the Franklin ASB Mathex Competition where we placed 3rd equal and 10th out of forty teams.

The class have been heading off to Patumahoe School each Tuesday to receive free swimming lessons with Fulton’s Swim School. Increased confidence, endurance and skill across the group has been evident already. We have also been training hard for Cross Country. Children have been calculating the distances they train and have been aiming to run the equivalent of a half of in some

cases a full marathon. All this training paid great dividends.

We have already accomplished so much this term; it is hard to believe that we are only half way through!

Rachael Shaw Class Teacher

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