Over the last few weeks of term one and this week we have been working on an inquiry related to helping agencies in our community. The children have researched a helping agency that appealed to them. I am feeling so proud of the children for wanting to make a difference to our world. Most children are now at the stage of planning and implementing a social action of some sort. These actions range from activities such as visiting the RSPCA and interviewing staff or collecting pet food to donate to feed the animals to children making contact with book sellers seeking donations for KidsCan to children contacting Foster Hope and seeking donations of items used in care packs to creating posters to advertise agencies to creating jingles to hook others into a cause to baking food items for Ronald McDonald House guests. Several children have even arranged their own offsite visits to gather more information or deliver items to their agency. We would love families to talk about what action your child is taking and support them to make this wonderful, positive difference in our community. This week O3 spent some time reflecting on what ANZAC Day means to us. We remembered the fallen soldiers and were grateful for our freedom. We spent time thinking about what it was like for both soldiers and those family members left at home. We wrote letters to and from home from the perspective of both the soldier and a younger sibling left behind. We tried to capture the mood by using excellent descriptive language. We are in the process of learning how to use a green screen to create our own movie using our letters. Check back for updates as we add our movies and writing samples. This is Lachlan's writing - have a read Welcome to term 2 Term 1 very quickly passed us by with our highlights being the big day out to Margaret Mahy, aquagym, collaborative teaching and learning and the very successful MKR competitions. A heartfelt thank you to everyone who contributed to the success of term 1, we look forward to working with you all in term 2.
It is with sadness we farewell Rachel Kelly this Friday. Rachel has been a part of the St Albans community for nine years and joined Ōtākaro hub in 2017. We have loved working her; Rachel always puts the children at the ‘heart’ of everything she does. We will miss her and wish her all the best for her exciting new role. Jodi Archbold and Olivia Hanson will become the job share partnership for the remainder of the year. Jodi will work Monday to Thursday and continue in her sports leadership role on a Friday. Olivia will teach on a Friday and every third Monday and Tuesday. We will also be seeing Ros Tippen in Ōtākaro more regularly. She will continue to provide Renee’s leadership release every second Thursday. Ros will now be Sam’s release teacher every Friday. We welcome Jo Lidstone to St Albans as our new Deputy Principal. Jo will be teaching mathematics in Ōtākaro. She will work as the fourth teacher in our hub while Renee continues to take the extension programme. Core Curriculum Our reading continues to be based on using a variety of comprehension strategies to help us understand what we are reading and to develop breadth and depth in our knowledge. In writing, our focus is narrative with a focus on storytelling using descriptive language to engage the reader. Multiplication and division with number knowledge and strategy learning will be the main focus in mathematics this term. Mid year assessment will begin mid term 2, prior to reports and three way learning conferences, which will be available in week 10. Arts This term we are offering an arts programme across both Year 5/6 hubs. Children have selected their preference from the available options and the majority got their first choice. We look forward to seeing the children get their groove on and whip out their dance moves, ability to play musical instruments, sing until their heart’s content or add some drama into their school life. Cross Country The children have been training hard and are excited to celebrate their efforts at our annual cross country. This event is about full participation and all children are encouraged to do their best. Our top 6 competitors in each race will have the opportunity to compete in the Zone competition in week 3. Children, please ensure you are wearing appropriate footwear whilst practising, and on the day. Families, we look forward to seeing you there to celebrate your child’s hard work and personal achievement. Inquiry we are continuing with our Helping Agencies inquiry for the first part of term two before moving onto a new topic related to earth science. Many of the children are at the stage of taking some kind of social action as part of their current inquiry. It would be fantastic if you had a chat with your child to find out more about what they are doing and what their next steps are. It is exciting to see children feeling excited about their learning and taking it in the direction that appeals to them. Keep checking the blog to see what a wonderful difference our children are making in our world. Health and PE we will be shifting our focus this term to invasion games. Children will improve on their ability to find and create space, along with working on their passing and catching skills and basic movement skills. Part of this programme includes developing children’s ability to manage games themselves, change rules to make games fairer and solve disputes without adult assistance. BYOD we are very grateful to the children who bring along their own device each day as this helps our learning programmes run smoothly. If you have a device at home that your child is able to bring along we would appreciate it a lot. We have 20 school devices across our hub available to the children who do not bring their own. If you have any questions regarding BYOD please feel free to chat to Sam. Today each of our home bases spent time reconnecting and enjoying catching up after the holidays.
We worked in our home base to reflect upon what ANZAC Day means to us - now and in the past. Each homebase did some great art to reflect an aspect of ANZAC Day. Check out our great work here. Today each of our home bases spent time reconnecting and enjoying catching up after the holidays.
We worked in our home base to reflect upon what ANZAC Day means to us - now and in the past. Each homebase did some great art to reflect an aspect of ANZAC Day. Check out our great work here. Today each of our home bases spent time reconnecting and enjoying catching up after the holidays.
We worked in our home base to reflect upon what ANZAC Day means to us - now and in the past. Each homebase did some great art to reflect an aspect of ANZAC Day. Check out our great work here. Today each of our home bases spent time reconnecting and enjoying catching up after the holidays.
We worked in our home base to reflect upon what ANZAC Day means to us - now and in the past. Each homebase did some great art to reflect an aspect of ANZAC Day. Check out our great work here. Today each of our home bases spent time reconnecting and enjoying catching up after the holidays.
We worked in our home base to reflect upon what ANZAC Day means to us - now and in the past. Each homebase did some great art to reflect an aspect of ANZAC Day. Check out our great work here. Today each of our home bases spent time reconnecting and enjoying catching up after the holidays.
We worked in our home base to reflect upon what ANZAC Day means to us - now and in the past. Each homebase did some great art to reflect an aspect of ANZAC Day. Check out our great work here. O2 have been spending their writing time at the end of last term working on describing a moment in time. Their focus has been on using their senses to guide their ideas, and on including some high quality adjectives, verbs and adverbs in their work. Here is an excellent piece written by Olivia:
My arm muscles screamed and my legs ached. Sweat beaded on my forehead as my legs stumbled forward. Hands drenched in sweat, though I still kept going. All around the sun blazed and the birds chirped. The leaves hit the ground and remained there like fallen soldiers. All I could see were the blurred figures of my brothers. Still I stumbled on. Chainsaw hacking at the branches. I could almost hear the dog laughing at me through the window as I dragged the hard branch into the driveway. I could taste my dry, pasty throat as I swallowed my spit, a poor substitute for water. Sweat ran into my mouth, still I kept going. My arms lifted up and thunk. The branch hits the trailer. Only 657 more branches to go. During writing we have been developing our story telling skills and have been working hard to add suspense and drama to our writing. We wrote descriptive stories and then used the free app Figment AR to create a portal in our classroom. Next we recorded our stories using iMovie. We had fun exploring how to speed up and slow down our video clip as well as adding sound effects and music to our voice recording. We are learning to hold the iPad still when we record and also to slow down when we are moving as we film. Check out our great work as we finish .. we will add more as they are completed. We have been developing our painting skills this term.
We have learned about how to hold paintbrushes correctly, how to mix colours and how to tint and tone. We used the Commonwealth Games as our inspiration for these fantastic pictograms that show the sports. First we divided our paper into segments, then we drew our pictogram. We painted our artwork in different tints and tones of the same colour before we added the black lines using vivid pens. In our O3 reading class we have been using Popplet to recall and sequence events from a story called Torty the Lucky Tortoise.
Have a look at these great ideas. Popplet is so fantastic and it is free (or you can upgrade to the paid app). It is available online or as an app. Today Sam’s reading class read the story Torty the Lucky Tortoise. This is an incredible true story about a tortoise that was rescued during World War One by a man named Stewart. He was a stretcher bearer in the war. He saw a tortoise get run over. He rescued it and the tortoise hibernated in his bag and ended up back in New Zealand! The tortoise has lived here ever since. It is now nearly 200 years old! We listened to the story being read to us while we followed along. Then we talked about what had happened and some of the interesting things we learned along the way. Our next step was to begin using Popplet to create a mind map of the information we had discovered. We are going to use this to group our ideas before we answer some questions about the story. Popplet is a great app to add to your own iPad - there is a free version that lets you make one popplet at a time or a paid version that means you can make lots of popplets and save them. In O3 we are writing stories based upon discovering a portal in our classroom! We imagined we arrived a school on what seemed to be an ordinary day and then describe what it was like to discover a portal that takes us to a whole new world. We have written some incredible stories based upon the following format
So far the stories are looking fantastic. We have finished writing now and today spent time editing our work with a buddy. Our next step is to use the fantastic free app called Figment AR to create a scene with us arriving at school and discovering the portal and then stepping inside. It is pretty exciting making the writing come to life like this! I have loved the excitement the children have shown and the quality of their writing has been very exciting. The descriptive language and creative ideas are fantastic. Over the next few days our stories will be published using the Figment AR app and then importing our AR movie into iMovie before we create a voice recording and add special effects to add to our great piece of writing. Check out these enthusiastic learners. This is some information for Sam’s reading class related to ANZAC Day this week.
|
2018 Term Dates
T1: 1 Feb - 13 April T2: 30 April - 6 July T3: 23 July - 28 Sept T4: 15 Oct - 18 Dec |
Proudly powered by Weebly