Our Assembly

Today our assembly is all about camp.

 Here are the books we made on book creator to share with everyone. 

On the first day of camp we stayed at school and completed five different activities. Our first book tells you all about them.

On the second day of camp we went to TOPEC. We hadn't been there before. We learnt about water safety in rivers, we went into the bush and cooked damper and marshmallows and we challenged ourselves on a ropes course. These books explain what we got up to in more detail.

We had a fabulous time at camp. Thank you to everyone that helped.

Mackenzie's Visit

We were lucky today to get a visit from Mackenzie. She's just been to Christchurch to have an operation to get her second cochlear implant. At the moment she can't hear anything at all because her wounds from the operations need to heal. Then she will go back to Christchurch and get 'switched on'. This means they'll attach the rest of the implant and Mackenzie will be able to hear again - and hopefully she;ll be able to hear better than before! Because she can't hear anything we had to write down messages and use facial and sign language.  Mackenzie was her usual happy smiling self and it was lovely to see her. We can't wait until she's back at school and back with all of us in Room 4.

Camp Writing

We've been doing some great brain storming and thinking about our camp. We're creating some writing that we will turn into a book creator and share in our assembly this week. Look at all our thinking......

We Have a Problem

Our chooks are really into the laying business now and we're getting lots of eggs each day. The problem is that some of them have holes in them! We think the hens are pecking them or breaking them accidentally.  So we did a bit of research.....
Emma and Isabel found that if an eggs shell is too thin it is easy to break. It could be too thin because the hens are missing something in their diet.
Liam and Jordan found that if a chook is missing something in their diet, they can start to peck their eggs to try and get some calcium.
Pascoe and Heidi discovered that we need to make sure there is lots of hay in the nesting boxes so it is soft and to make sure not too many hens have to use one nesting box.
We are now looking into what nutritional needs a chook has so we can make sure we provide them with everything they need.

Emma also found this video for us......

Maths Problem Solving

Today we entered the "ZONE OF CONFUSION". This means we were prepared to feel a bit uncertain and confused in order to learn something new.  We worked our way through the problems below, talking with our buddies and sharing our learning. You might like to get your child to share how they solved these problems.

Tom and Ben are collecting crabs. They put their crabs into one bucket. Altogether they have 10 crabs. How many crabs could each boy have put in the bucket?

Pippa and Porsche did this:

 Charlotte has crabs and starfish in her bucket. She counted all the legs in her bucket - each crab has 8 legs and each starfish 5 legs. Altogether there were 60 legs. How many crabs and starfish are in the bucket? 

Thomas, Charlie and Jordan did this:

James built a sandcastle and decorated it with shells. Each shell is about 4cm long. He used 78 shells placed next to each other in a wavy line all around his castle. How many metres is the wavy line of shells?

Heidi Mackenzie and  Pascoe did this:

4x7=28 and 4x8=32 and then we plused them.   When we discussed this as a class we found that there was an error because 78 is not a 7 and an 8 it is a 70 and an 8. Therefore we should have done 4x70=280 and 4x8=32 so 280+32=312cm. Now we need to turn it into metres so the answer is 3metres and 12cm.

Taitania, Georgia and Porsche did this:

 In my bucket were 5 more shells than starfish. There were twice as many starfish as crabs. Altogether there were 45 items in my bucket. How many shells, starfish and crabs are in the bucket? 

We are still finding an answer to the last question.....

Day One Of Camp

A beautiful day for day one of camp. The kids are enjoying a range of rotational activities.

Riskometer

We used our Riskometer today for the first time. The kids placed their names along the riskometer either at high, medium or low depending on how much of a risk they were prepared to take with their writing today. Taking a risk means pushing themselves to try new things or including tricky parts of writing in their work. After we have written we check whether we actually did take the risk we thought we were going to.

What is a Uvula???

We had fun finding out all about our Uvula 's today as part of our Wonder of the Day. Do you know what your Uvula is? Where is it in your body? What is its job? Ask any of the Room 4 kids if you want to know the answers. ....

Baking with our School Eggs

Our school chickens have started laying and soon we'll be able to sell the eggs at the gate. But at the moment only one or two have started laying, so we thought we'd better use the 7 eggs we had before they went off.  We googled 'easy baking with eggs' and found a yummy looking recipe for Brownie. Below is the link to the recipe if you want to make them at home.

Chewy Fudge Brownies    

Reading - Mariana Trench

Today in reading we explored how using what we already know can help us to make sense of texts.  We read the passage below first and found it quite tricky.

Exploring New Regions
Our craft, Trieste, is finally nearing the unworldly surface. It seems like forever that we've been drifting through the darkness, but at last we can make out the small hills and valleys on the surface below. 
On this journey we hope to encounter living things, but around our craft there isn't yet any sign of life. 

 Then we re-read the text with this new title.

Exploring the Ocean's Depths 
Our craft, Trieste, is finally nearing the unworldly surface. It seems like forever that we've been drifting through the darkness, but at last we can make out the small hills and valleys on the surface below. 
On this journey we hope to encounter living things, but around our craft there isn't yet any sign of life. 

Suddenly we could make more sense of the words because of what we already knew about oceans and crafts that go under the ocean!  We discussed that this is called using our PRIOR KNOWLEDGE.  We were all really interested to learn that this passage was about the Mariana Trench. In fact we were so interested in the Mariana Trench that we watched a couple of videos about it and googled some information.  Here are a couple of videos about the Trench.

Now we know about using what we already know AND we know about the Mariana Trench!!!

Punctuation Ladder

This is our punctuation ladder. We all start at the bottom and move up the steps of the ladder as we show that we can do each step. We have to consistently show that we are using the required punctuation before we can move up a step. We'll show you our progress as the year goes on, so keep an eye out on this blog or pop into our class.

 

 

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Learning About Big Numbers

Since we've been away from school for so long we thought we'd play a game to that would help get our brains back into gear. We were split into 4 teams and given the numbers 1,2,3,4,5. Everyone had one number and we also had a team leader without a number.

Mrs Hancock would call out a number in the tens of thousands and we had to race to get our team and numbers into the right order.We really enjoyed this game and definitely got our brains into gear again. Here's a snippet of this game... 

Successful Learning

Today we had a think about our learning and what we need to do to have a successful year. We all had some thoughtful ideas. Now we're going to look at our answers and see what we (and Mrs Hancock) can do to help ourselves and each other be successful with our learning.

Writing with a Prompt

Today during Daily Writing the students used this picture to inspire them. They had to write at least 6 sentences about who lives in the house, what kind of job they have and what kind of person they are. They had about 15 minutes to do the task. Below are some of their ideas.

In the house there lived a zombie. His job was eating dead peoples brains. He built houses for a job. The only thing he eats is brains. He is a creep. He hates humans.  BY CHARLIE

The person that lives there is a man called Bob. Bob is a tree cutter. His house in in the forest. His house looks like a church but it doesn't on the inside.  It has stairs and webs and it looks creepy inside. The man is very nice. BY EPHRAIM

Bob lives in the rickety old house in the middle of the darkened and cursed forest because the house only cost $1. His job is making cheese in a cheese factory for all the people in Australia. Bob is a Blacksmith. The house has a broken window. It has an anvil with it in the back yard and a paddock in the front yard. BY LIAM 

There are two old ladies living in this house. They are not nice ladies because they are both witches! They are not very happy so their job is to make other people sad. Their house is at the end of the woods. The house is very old and they never clean it. No one ever came to visit them until one day....a little girl went strolling through the woods and she came to their house. She knocked three times on the wall ( because they didn't have a door). The witches told her to come inside and they killed her. Then the witches killed her Mum and Dad when they came looking for her. So never go knocking at strangers houses!   BY HEIDI

Who lives there? A witch!!!! I've got more bad news - she kills people! Her hair touches her bum and her feet look like birds feet! AAGGHH! One more thing....I never want to see her again!                  BY GEORGIA

2015 - Let's Be Brave and Challenge Ourselves

Welcome to Room 4's 2015 blog.  This year we are a Year 4 and 5 class with 22 kids.  During the first week we're going to be talking about being brave with our learning by taking risks. We're going to check our 'braveness' on a 'riskometer' a bit like this one. 

We're also going to be doing a fair bit of wondering this year.  Wondering about all sorts of things that interest or confuse us. You'll be able to check out our Wondering Wall in a couple of weeks.

Keep checking in here to see how we're going with our learning.....