Last week of Term

I can't believe it's the last week of term.

And sadly that means that I am out of the class for the next year on Maternity Leave.

I want to say a big "Thank You" to all the amazing whanau, tamariki and staff who I've had a lot to do with over the past few years. However I will definitely be popping in whenever I can and seeing everyone around!

I can't wait to see what everyone in Room 3 and the school gets up to over the next wee while, and I will be keeping everyone posted on when "Room 3's Baby" arrives.

Have a safe and happy holiday everyone!

Mrs Hitchy and Room 3

ANZAC

Last week and this week we have been working on our Anzac Poems.

The Year 3 and 4 students have been producing Acrostic Poems, using the letters in ANZAC.

We started by reading stories about Anzac, and getting familiar with what Anzac is about and why it is important to us.

Then we looked for all the adjectives that started with the letters we needed and worked out how we could put them into short sentences. Once we had finished our short sentences we read over them, and corrected our spelling and checked they made sense.

Anzac is the best because in war they fight for NZ and Australia.
New Zealand is the best because it is a great country for people to live in.
Zoom went the bullets and boom went the guns.
Armies fighting in the hot sun.
Can you remember the soldiers who died for us?

By Cleo

A lot of people go to Anzac at Kaiuku Marae
Nannies and Papas line up.
Zahn and the Yr 3's and 4's are celebrating Anzac.
An amazing view as the sun comes up.
Celebrating the bravery of the soldiers who died.

By Oasis

Shadows

While learning about planets we touched on the magnificent of Te Ra (the sun).

We all know quite a lot about Te Ra, but today we investigated how Te Ra makes shadows.
We could see shadows in class, and we talked about all the other sources of light which help to make shadows.
We even read the book "The Gruffalo's Child", where the tiny mouse is kept safe from being the Gruffalo's dinner by making his shadow large and frightening.

After writing about how the mouse kept himself safe by using his shadow we went outside and investigated the shadows we could see.

In partners we drew around each others shadows with chalk. We worked out this was pretty tricky when our own shadow kept hopping in the way!

Then we traced around the shadow the trees were leaving on the concrete, because we had discussed that our shadows only moved when we moved.

We were all very shocked when we came back after lunch to see that the trees shadow had moved! And we're all pretty certain the trees didn't move! This led us to thinking about who else could have been moving! Te Ra! (but he is moving so much slower now thanks to Maui).

We will continue to look at shadows over the next couple of weeks and discuss why the sun is moving, and if it is the sun moving or us......

Watch this space!

Getting ready for Gala

This year Gala is being held on Easter Friday, which is only a few weeks away.

Every year our classes have a stall at gala where they sell items to help make pūtea for the school.

This year in Room 3 we are making candles, as well as some jewellery.

Today is our first day of having a "crafternoon" where we will begin to construct our candles. We are setting them in concrete so that once they burn out we will still have a candle holder where we can place another candle.

In preparation for our "crafternoon" Whaea Ads helped us write up our instructions in English, as well as Te Reo Maori. This way we will be able to check in our books to see what it is we are supposed to be doing.

1. Get your container
Tikina mai tō ipu.

2. Fill with concrete
Whakakī i ngā whakapiri

3. Put your candle in it.
Purua  tō kanara ki roto.

Oasis and Ishika's instructions with their pictures of what they think the candles will look like. 

Keep your eyes peeled to see our finished results!

There was an old lady who.....

While our Yr 3 and 4 tamariki are busy preparing their speeches, the Yr 1 and 2's have been busy reading some very funny and interesting books so that we can write about them.

One of this weeks funny books was "There was an Old Lady who swallowed a Mozzie!". So we put our thinking caps on and wrote about what we thought the Old Lady could be swallowing next.

We had a lot of thinkers who were thinking of funny things for the Old Lady to swallow, and some thinkers who were thinking about the things you would actually be able to fit in your mouth. One of our writers even invented a new animal for the lady to swallow (have a look for Tarquinn-Zaid's "Sharktopus").

While we write we have been making sure we are using our fullstops and capital letters, which show our readers when our sentence start and stop. Our Yr 2's have been working on sounding out the words they don't yet know how to write.

Below are some intriguing pictures of our "Old Lady's" and some talented writing to go with them.

By Charlotte

By Tane

By Melody

By Tarquinn-Zaid

By Paskalle

Paper Mache Planets

Because we are learning about the planets and our solar system at the moment, we have been constructing our own planets out of paper mache.

The first thing we did was blow up our balloons, and then we attached some string so that we could hang them, and put our names on them.

Once we had done that we put on our paint jackets and got stuck into the glue! We covered our balloons in glue and then started to add little bits of paper to our balloon.

Our planets are currently drying in class if you want to come and see them. We have added another layer of paper, and just have one more to go before we start to paint them!

We have been practising our planet song as well so that we know all the awesome facts about our planets.

Junior Swimming Sports

Yesterday we had an awesome day spent racing our very talented swimming opposition at Nuhaka School.

We all bundled onto the bus and arrived at Nuhaka ready to race at 10am. First up were the 8yr olds. These tamariki not only had Junior Swimming Sports to compete in, but next week they are also competing in the Senior Swimming Sports at Morere. After the 8yr olds we moved onto the 7yr olds, and raced our way down the age groups to finish the day with our 5 year old girls racing.

We have some very talented swimmers at Te Mahia, who got stuck in and gave their races their all. The pool was full of big smiles and lots of laughter, and some very good sportsmanship. A big congratulations to all our competitors for giving it a go, they made us all very proud.

By the end of the day all tamariki had big smiles on their faces, and enjoyed getting into the water and showing what they're made of.

A very big thank you to whanau who came and supported tamariki, as well as those who were a very big help with minding tamariki and marshalling, we couldn't do it without your support.

It was a great day had by all.

Kaimoana!

Last week we had an awesome opportunity to learn from Craig Petherick, a fisheries officer, Nanny Sophie and Nanny Rae, about the importance of looking after all the kaimoana found around Mahia.

This week we got to go and harvest some of this delicious kaimoana, and sample it ourselves.

First we headed down to the beach opposite the golf club to look for some yummy tuatua. We found a few before we had to dash off quickly to the pipi beds at Oraka, before the tide changed.

Tamariki had so much fun digging their toes in to find pipi.

Once we had found plenty of pipi we hopped back into the bus and met Nanny Rae at the beach in front of her house, where she had some pupu. While hunting for pupu Uncle Jason popped up out of the water with some crayfish! How lucky we were to be able to see some live crayfish.

By this stage we were all very hungry so we were lucky it was time to head to Tuahuru to begin prepping the kai.

We are very lucky that we had a lot of support from a lot of whanau who had provided us with Paua, eel and some beautiful kingfish, to eat alongside the kaimoana we had already gathered.

Tamariki had a blast learning about how to prepare some of the kaimoana, and had even more fun consuming it. While they were preparing the kaimoana we also had a visit from Moana Cooper, our local fisheries officer, who was impressed with the tamariki's knowledge on the legal gathering of kaimoana.

It was a very enjoyable day, and one where the tamariki learnt a lot about the amazing environment that they live in.

Quiz our tamariki when you see them next about their awesome knowledge of kaimoana harvesting and preparing.

Mrs Hitchy and Room 3

Maui, a constable and Kaimoana!

As the title suggests- a very busy week indeed!

We have had so many exciting things going on.

In Room 3 this week we have been reading about Maui and how he harnessed Te Ra (the Sun). Te Ra is the centre of our solar system, which we are learning about at the moment. Thanks to Maui we get to enjoy Te Ra's beautiful warmth over a day.

Oasis and Lucy both wrote some beautiful stories about Te Ra and Maui. They used adjectives, and thought about the important details from the book. Both of these super star writers have their writing up on the Shining Stars board in class, if you would like to read it.

On Wednesday we had a visit from Constable Carolyn. Some of Room 3 tamariki met Constable Carolyn last year when she came to teach us about keeping ourselves safe. This year Constable Carolyn came to discuss Vehicle passenger safety.
 We talked about all the important things to remember when riding in the bus, as well as learning to safely cross the road. The most important thing is to look and listen!

Tamariki demonstrated their amazing road crossing skills on the Kura driveway.

Earlier in the week we had discussed with tamariki their favourite kaimoana, and how important it is to all of us who live in Mahia. We also discussed how much kaimoana we could gather legally and where from. Some of us were unsure of the answers to our questions so we decided to invite in someone who was an expert at looking after our kaimoana.

Nanny Sophie Dodd, Nanny Rae, and Craig Petherick came to speak to us about how to look after our Mataitai, and how much kai moana we can gather. Tamariki enjoyed listening to our visitors, and are very keen to look after kai moana so that it is still in the moana when they are adults.  Thank you very much to our visitors for coming to share their information with us.

Next week we will be gathering some kaimoana and sampling it!

Enjoy your weekend whanau and be safe,

Mrs Hitchy and Room 3