Constructa-Bots and Biscuits.

Last week we had a visit from Miss Grover, and she had with her our very new and impressive Constructa Bots!

These Robots are specially for Room 2 and 3 and will help us with our navigation and programming.

We had a lot of fun programming our constructa bots and sending them to our friends on the mat.

The other week we sent our biscuits away in our "quickly" planned envelopes. They arrived back at school and all our biscuits had broken- apart from Miss D'Aths. We discussed that this was because we hadn't planned our designs very well and hadn't used our technology to "protect" our biscuits. 

So this week we planned some better materials to make our envelopes out of and planned how we could protect our biscuits round 2! We will let you know what condition they are in when they return! 

We hope you all have a good week and we shall update you next week with our latest technology challenge and our Ripper Rugby tournament.

Technology

This term we are focussing on Technology and "The big wide world".

In Room 3 we have been talking about how technology helps us and protects us. We looked at the every day things we do and investigated how an envelope protects our letters- what if we wanted to post someone a biscuit??

This led to us designing our own envelopes for our biscuits. We each had 2 sheets of A4 paper, and some cello tape. Round one saw Miss D'Ath being the postman, and accidentally dropping the mail bag a few times.... however I was much to kind a postman and none of our biscuits broke. That saw us investigating Round two- would our biscuits survive in our envelopes if we sent them in the mail for real?

We each redesigned our envelopes and popped our biscuits in and off to the mail box they went. It took them a week to head into...... (we're not sure how far they got- that's our next investigation) and finally they were back to us at school. Room 3 were pretty excited to open up our envelopes.............
but unfortunately all our biscuits were broken...... except for Miss D'Ath (who didn't cheat!) but had thought hard about the best way to package her biscuits.

Our biscuits back from their trip to the mail centre! 

Next step we are having a good hard think about how we could re package our biscuits and we will get them into the mail again... this time we will check with Trina, our mail lady, to see how far our biscuits are travelling!

Miss D'Ath's surviving biscuit!

Checking our biscuits.

Our Paper Planes

In Room 3 at the moment we are learning to write to inform someone about something.

Last week we found some instructions on how to make paper planes.
We followed the picture instructions and created our own paper planes. We then took them outside to see whose plane would go the furtherest. We decided it all depended on the wind and how you threw it. We have some very talented plane throwers!

Once we had finished flying our paper planes we decided that picture instructions were quite tricky to follow and that writing down the steps that we needed would make it a lot easier for someone else to follow.

Our Room 3 writers are improving every day and they made sure they added important words to their instructions, such as "folding it lengthways", and "make it into a triangle". With these important words included people would know how to make the best paper planes.

So if you are after a good set of instructions on how to make paper planes definitely come and see our Room 3 writers.

Whangawehi Planting and O'Briens Farm Visit

Today we were very lucky to spend the day out in the sunshine planting trees at Whangawehi and looking around the O'Briens Wetlands.

We started the morning off with tree planting at the Whangawehi river. The first tree we planted was a beautiful Totara tree in memory of Matua Edward. The children were very lucky to have learnt a lot from Matua Edward so it was very nice that they were able to show their appreciation with this tree.

Once we had finished planting the trees we were back into the bus and off to Pat and Sue O'Briens farm to look around their wetlands. When we arrived Sue (aka Mummy O'B) had a chat to us about what a wetland was and the importance of them. We learnt that wetlands are good for acting as a filter for our water- so all the water that is dirty from stock etc filters through the wetland and comes out a lot cleaner. Mummy O'B's wetland water comes out in the Whangawehi awa, so it is super important that it is clean.

On our walk around the wetlands we also had 16 trees to plant. We got stuck into this in peers, while the rest of us weeded around the plants which had been planted earlier. Tamariki were very lucky that they had the chance to explore areas further up the Whangawehi to help with their understanding of why we are protecting it.

A very big thank you to all the people who come and spend their time with us on our enviroschool days. We are so lucky you all come to share your knowledge with us all. Also a very big thank you to Pat and Sue O'Brien for allowing us to explore the wetlands and sharing your knowledge.

Groups Of

We are super mathematicians in Room 3.

This term we are learning about Multiplication! And believe it or not half of our class can now say "multiplication". Room 3 learners are using their skip counting skills to help them work out their tricky multiplication questions.

We have all learnt that the multiplication sign x means "groups of", so if we have the question
4 x 2 = we know that we need to find 4 groups of 2. In Room 3 we work this out by drawing our groups:

OO          OO           OO       OO
one group               two groups             three groups         four groups

Then we count how much we have in our groups and because there is two in each group we can skip count in twos.



Today Room 3 were very lucky to have spent some time outside with Whaea Pepi. They had the special task of drawing their "groups of" on the concrete with chalky so that they could record their thinking.

If you see any Room 3 learners ask them how their "multiplication" learning is going.

Week 2

Welcome to week 2.
This week we have been exploring our new learning.

In Maths this term we are learning about "Multiplication". This is one pretty tricky big word, but if you see a Room 3 student floating around quiz them on what they know about it. They're pretty awesome and have already learnt so much about Multiplication and working out groups of.

We have a new way of working on our literacy this term. We have a brand spanking new literacy centre which focusses on all our new learning in Reading and Writing. We have had a lot of fun working on our new centres. Especially our Story Stones.

It is only 2 weeks in and we have some super writers who have been spending a lot of time making sure their writing is the best it possibly can be. These writers will be reading their work aloud at assembly tomorrow so I will make sure you can all read about it here once it is completed.

This term we are focussing our inquiry learning around technology and every Thursday is our technology challenge day. Today we all had a lot of fun constructing a tower that held a marshmallow. The aim was to construct the tallest tower.  Below are some photos of the fun.

Enjoy the rest of your week and we shall pop in next week.