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

Writing in Room 3

We are keeping our eyes peeled for super duper writers in Room 3 this term.

We have a board set up specially to display super learning, so if you're at school feel free to come and have a look at it! These four writers will have their writing up there for you all to come and see.

As mentioned last week we had a special visitor, Harold the Giraffe, come and visit us last week. Today in class we sat down and we talked about all the words we thought of when we thought of Harold. We had some super thinkers come up with a lot of interesting words such as spots, and friendly, and we all worked on putting them into our sentences. Some of us were recounting Harold's visit, and others were talking about there pictures of Harold.

Alyss put a lot of hard work into recounting exactly what happened when Harold came to school, and what he teaches us about in his classroom.

Cleo has been working hard on getting down as many of her ideas as she can in our writing time, and today she got down a lot of ideas, and sentences about what we all did in Harolds classroom.

Melody is working hard on sounding out new words, and she wrote a detailed recount with new words like music and truck.

And Monica-Jean had drawn a beautiful picture about Harold, and had a very big story to tell about her picture. Monica-Jean filled up an entire page with her story!

These learners deserve a big pakipaki, and if you are at school please do come and read their learning.

Enjoy the weekend and we shall be back with all the learning we get up to in Week 3.

Mrs Hitchy and Room 3

Welcome to 2017

Kia ora Room 3 Whanau,

And a big welcome to 2017! We have a very exciting term ahead of us.

First we need to welcome three new faces. Oceanz is Kharma-Lee's younger brother and is now a big 5 year old. Melody is a new Year 2 student at Te Mahia, and is new at Te Mahia School with her older Cousin Aotearoa. And Tane who is a Year 1 student, lives right next door to the school, so he only needs to cross the field to get to class!

Tane and Melody before their swim! 

We have jumped straight into our swimming this week, which has been good in this hot hot sun. Thank you whanau for making sure tamariki have their togs at school daily.

This week we also had a very exciting guest - which you may have all heard about, yes Harold the Giraffe was in Mahia, and he taught us about being unique, and how to make new people at school feel happy to be at school. We are all working hard to make sure our new people feel right at home in Room 3, and Harold had some very good stories to help us understand how other people may be feeling.

And there is a big chance tamariki have told you all that Mrs Hitchy will be having a break from teaching at the end of this term, as she is busy growing a small human in her puku. Tamariki have been helping her with a list of baby names, and are all putting their hands up to be baby sitters.

Some of our tamariki are also in training for the weetbix tryathlon. So if you see them out and about running and swimming make sure you cheer them on.

We hope you all have a fantastic Waitangi weekend!

Mrs Hitchy and Room 3