Christmas is coming!

This week we have been researching how we can make our beans grow (round 2). We have been thinking hard about what what our beans need and we decided they need soil, sun, water and oxygen. We also think the reason they weren't growing was because they were getting too much water, and not enough sun. So we are hoping this next batch begins to grow before it's time to take them home!

While we wait for our beans to grow we have been practising our Christmas carols and getting ready for Christmas. Our Christmas carol for this year at prize giving is "Rudolph the red nose reindeer". We have become pretty clever at it and this morning a lot of us came to school singing it!

We have also written a letter each to Hana Koko. So hopefully he's not too busy and we will get a letter back from him before we are off on our Christmas holidays.

All this preparation for Christmas has us thinking very hard about reindeer! We have a competition running if we can name all 9 of Hana Koko's reindeer off by heart!
We are also going to be running a bit of an investigation into reindeer next week while our seniors are on camp.

We hope you have all had a good week!

Mrs Hitchy and Room 3

Kapa Haka

We had such an amazing day at Kapa Haka.

And our Tamariki were amazing! They definitely set the tone for the day.
Some of our brand new school students loved every moment of it and put a lot of energy and effort into making sure they knew all of the actions and songs. They were pretty awesome to see in the front row, and some of them have only been at school for a few weeks!

After Kapa Haka we looked through all the videos and photos, and then brainstormed all of the words we could think of, to do with Kapa Haka.

We came up with a very large list! Then we used photos of ourselves and cut them out and wrote in "speech bubbles" what we thought of the day and our favourite part.

Below are Paskalle, Monica-Jean, Neon and Charlotte with their awesome pictures talking about Kapa Haka.

A very big Thank You to all the whanau who helped out before and during the day and an extra big Thank You to Miss Kereru for making sure tamariki were ready and confident with their bracket! They rocked!

Kapa Haka Preparation

We have spent this week perfecting and fine tuning our Kapa Haka performance.
Tamariki have been putting a lot of effort into their performance so that we look remarkable for the day.

The Kapa Haka festival is happening next Wednesday right here at Te Mahia School. We will be performing from 9:30 (the powhiri) through to 10am where we will begin our bracket.

Some of our tamariki in Room 3 are brand new to school so spending time going over Kapa Haka has been very different from what they are used to, however they have been picking up all that they can and joining in like pro's.

Below are some photos from our practises. We look forward to seeing everyone at the performance next Wednesday (and if the weather decides it wants to rain the festival will be moved to Thursday).

Writing Star for Week 4

We have some very talented writers in Room 3, and Hikurangi is one of them. On Monday he decided he would write a story about halloween.

Hiku uses his top page to work out our new words, and writes his story on the bottom page. Hiku came up with this sentence by himself, and look at his beautiful handwriting.

I thought it was a very appropriate story for Halloween.

If your up in Room 3 and your lucky, Hiku may share some of his other stories with you!

"Halloween was cancelled because someone robbed the candy"

TEXTing

We've been thinking hard about why it is important that we learn to write in Room 3, and sometimes it's hard to understand why we might need the skills of writing in the real world.

Today a group of us played a game which had us all writing frantically and having a big laugh while we did it. We ended up with pages and pages of writing because of it!

The idea of the game was to take away the "chore" of writing and help us see that one of the main importances of writing is communication.

We all received a blank sheet of paper and a felt pen, with the first instruction that we weren't allowed to talk. We pretended our piece of paper was our "cell phone" or "Ipad/tablet". Then we had to "communicate" by writing messages to each other.

Our own pieces of paper had our names on them so that when we passed our "phones" to the person we were contacting they knew who the message was from, and they would reply on our "phone" so that we ended up with big lists of messages to and from one another. Some people were getting bombarded with lots of messages at once, but they would pile them up and work through one message at a time.

This activity was great fun, and we will be doing it again in class with different topics for discussion. We had a lot of people think hard about the messages they were "sending", and some people were attempting to spell the sounds that our phones would make when receiving and sending a text.

We even have some smaller people very eager to get into the skill of "communicating" with writing so that they can join us next time.

Lucy finding peoples names on our Reading Buddy lists.

Kaedyn writing Mrs Hitchy a message.

Rahkai getting bombarded with messages. 

Beans!

We have planted our beans!

First we had to work out what order our instructions went. Mrs Hitchy had muddled them up when printing them, so everyone had to sit down and decide what happened before what.

Once we had worked out what order to do things, we got stuck into getting them done!

First we had to get our cups, a bean seed, and some soil, then we named our cups so we knew whose bean was whose. Once we had done that we filled our cups with soil, and pressed our bean seeds into the soil. We neatly covered our seeds with soil so we couldn't see them, and then watered them before putting them on our bean growing table.

As well as planting our beans in soil we also have a bean seed growing in a snaplock bag. This is so we can view it growing and understand what our beans are doing underneath the soil.

Every morning we check how our beans are growing, so far none have come out from the soil, but we can see our snaplock bag bean is changing rapidly every day. We compare what stage it is on our bean chart and think that our beans will be close to coming out of the soil soon.

If you're up at school come and see our awesome beans, some of us are hoping we may have used magic bean seeds, but we'll just have to wait to see how big they get.

Fraction Fun

Room 3 tamariki have been learning about, and understanding fractions. They could identify that fractions are made up of parts/sections/pieces but furthermore each of these are equal or even, as they would say. They learnt that the top number in a fraction is the numerator and tells us how many times the unit fraction is counted. I have noticed though a lot of tamariki refer to the numerator as the number coloured or shaded in, therefore reiterating in class and at home that the numerator is the number of times the unit fraction is counted will help in their understanding of fractions. The bottom number in a fraction is known as the denominator, this number tells us how many parts/sections/pieces the whole is split into.

For example, ¼ means one of fourths/quarters.

Tamariki in our kowhai math group have been learning to equally share objects into 2 groups (identifying halves of objects). Most of the tamariki can identify and verbalise that two halves make one whole. This is evident especially with food. The tamariki told me that sometimes their sandwiches are cut into halves, or they tell the teacher on duty at lunchtime, “I can only eat half my sandwich”. Making connections with math using real life contexts is important in their learning so give it a go at home whānau, I bet the tamariki would love learning about fractions with you.

Healthy Me!

This term we are looking at "Healthy Me", and all the ways we are healthy.

We started the week by talking about the word healthy and the things we think are healthy. We wrote all our ideas about how we are healthy down on some leaves which we have put on our class beanstalks on our topic wall.

We had some pretty cool ideas about how and why we are healthy, some people drew a fire because they keep warm, which keeps them healthy. Other people wrote down all the healthy sports they play, and others listed all the healthy foods they eat.

In the mornings we have been doing some "Cosmic Kids Yoga" (have a look on youtube), which has been challenging us all, but has been a lot of fun!

We've also been looking at our little garden plants and making sure they are healthy and growing well. We are investigating what a plant needs to stay healthy and on Friday we will be planting our class beans.

Yesterday we had a look at our bean seeds and worked out how they grow and in what order.

If you're up at school come and look at our little garden and all our healthy leaves!

This week we also have two new people to welcome to Room 3, and one person to welcome back! Monica-Jean joined us in Week 9 last term, and is pretty excited to be a big school girl, as well as Paskalle who started school this week. We also say a big welcome back to Oasis.

Hope you've all had a good week 1!

Mrs Hitchy and Room 3

Cosmic Kids Yoga

Looking at our bean seeds!

Cutting out our bean growing sequence!

Ordering our Bean Growing Sequence

Ordering our Bean Growing Sequence

Week 8

How nice is it to see the sun back, and with that sun were some very happy tamariki to be outside enjoying it!

This week we were busy getting stuck into our wearable arts performance where our tamariki did an awesome job! They were very talented actors and they were also very amusing comedians as well.
As well as putting on an amazing performance they were also very respectful audience members.

This week we have also been busy with New Worlds Little Garden seedlings. Thank you to all the whanau who have been sending them to school. Room 3 have had a blast planting them, and have been fascinated by the way the soil discs grow with water. Hopefully our seeds will be up soon and we can view our little garden growing on our windowsill!

If you do happen to have any Little Garden sets at home which you are not wanting, we would love to have them.

The BFG

We have slowly been reading the BFG by Roald Dhal in Room 3. We put our imagination caps on and we can close our eyes while we listen because there aren't many pictures to look at.

On Wednesday we were practising using really impressive describing words to describe the BFG in our writing. We started with the word tall and we brainstormed all the better words we could use instead of tall. We also thought about the things we knew were tall and how we could compare them to the BFG.

Here is Alyss, and Cleo's writing about the BFG:

The BFG has humongous feet. He is long like a sky scraper up to the sky. He has gigantic clothing. He has giant eyes. He has a large home.

By Alyss


The BFG is gigantic, just like Miss Hickling and just like a giraffe. He has big ears and he has long legs. He has big eyes and he's big just like Paddy.

By Cleo

Rereading and sentences!

Today we were writing a plan for how we are going to construct our wearable arts!

The "Comma's" writing group were focussing on rereading as they wrote their plan and making sure all their sentences have fullstops and capital letters where they needed them.

We looked at what we wanted our costumes to look like, what materials we would use to create it with, and how we would attach it all together.

This is Lucy's plan for her costume:

My costume is going to be green because I am in the earth group. My costume is green and my group is using green things. I am using green flax. I am going to use tape and the flax to hold it together.

Whangawehi Planting

On Tuesday we headed down to the Whangawehi Awa to plant some more trees and to put in our new penguin houses.

We go down there every year to plant trees and this year we were able to see how much our trees which we had planted 3 years ago were growing. They are now a bit taller than Waitama! (He's pretty tall too!). So we decided that in 20 years time they are going to be very tall!

We arrived and Nic had already dropped off all the trees and was busy digging holes for us. We gathered up everything we would need and got into pairs to begin planting.

When planting trees it is important to make sure they are covered at the base of the plant- but not too or too low, as this could either kill the weeds or suffocate the plant.

We had little fertiliser discs to drop into the holes before putting the plants in, and then we put a green stake next to our tree so that if the grass grows faster than the tree we will still be able to find it.

Once we had planted all the trees we had morning tea. It was a break well earned for some of our busy tree planters, who were planting try very quickly and effectively.

After morning tea we got into our house groups and set about putting the penguin houses out. Penguins don't enjoy wet feet inside their houses so we made sure we put them up high away from the tide. We put some of them next to our three year old trees so that in the years to come the penguin can enjoy the shade of the trees.

We had a fun morning getting a lot done.

A very big thank you to everyone who came and helped us. We wouldn't have enviro-school days without you!

Nic telling us about what has been trapped so far.

Tarquinn-Zaid with one of our penguin houses.

Whangawehi Awa

Lucy and Lisa planting their trees.

Morning Tea time!

Shevy resting after lifting his penguin house into place!

Learning about Mountains - Nga Maunga

Room 3 tamariki were very busy today creating their maunga using different shades of green card. They worked productively and I have to admit we have some very talented artist in room 3!!

At the beginning of the week tamariki in Room 3 were told the story Battle of the mountains. This story tells the traditional Maori myth of the battle between the mighty Tongariro Mountain and three smaller mountains Ruapehu, Tongariro and Ngaruhoe. The battle took place in the central North Island, each mountain trying to win the love of the beautiful female mountain Pihanga. The mountains were raging with volcanic lava and hurling rocks as weapons. When the battle ended the lovely Pihanga stood close by Tongariro's side.

Taranaki wild with anger and grief uplifted his roots from the ground and left the other mountains. Weeping, he plunged towards the setting sun, gouging out a deep wide trench. When he reached the sea he turned north and stumbled up the coast. As he slept that night the Pouakai Ranges snared and trapped Taranaki in the place he now rests. The next day a stream of clear water sprang from the side of Tongariro. It flowed down the deep path Taranaki had left on his journey to the coast to form the Whanganui River.

The tamariki enjoyed listening to the story and had many questions they wanted to ask too. They also wrote their own short recount of the story using very descriptive words.

When the children were asked about the different maunga in Mahia just about all the tamariki could name some of the maunga here - Maungakahia, Mokotahi, Te Ara o Paikea, Taupiri, Tairea, and Hikurangi. The tamariki are familiar with the names of these maunga as they are the names our house groups at school. Some tamariki identify with Puharareke as their maunga in their pepeha too.

Most of our tamariki at school have walked past or up Maungakahia situated around Nukutaurua. We sing waiata that includes the names of the maunga listed above too. Next steps are identifying where the maunga are situated in Mahia.

Culturally it is important for Maori to know and be able to share their whakapapa – to know one’s whakapapa is to know one’s identity. Our maunga is what anchors us here and with tamariki identifying their maunga (whether it be in Mahia or another location) they can relate to their whenua.

Room 3 tamariki always enjoy listening to stories and learning about the history of Mahia. They also get to enjoy creating art based on what they are learning and love singing waiata from around home.

So whanau ask your tamariki what they have been learning in class. I’m sure our room 3 tamariki will tell you all about it.

Friends

We have spent the last several weeks doing a friends program with Whaea Leith.

This has helped us think about the kind and cool things we could do with our friends.
It is important that we look after one another in Room 3, because we are all special, and nobody likes someone being unfriendly to them.

Garfield the cat has been helping us out, he watches all the nice things we do in class and reports back to Whaea Leith when she comes out for our lessons. He has been telling Whaea Leith a lot of really cool things lately.

He has been noticing a lot of awesome tuakana teina relationships between our tamariki who have been in Room 3 for a long time, and our teina who have just arrived.

He has also been listening to some awesome compliments that a lot of our tamariki have been giving to one another as well as visitors.

We are an amazingly nice and friendly class who have been working hard on being the best friends we can be!