End of year happenings

We've had a great year in Room 12 in 2011.  Thank you for sharing in our learning and for leaving such valued comments throughout the year.  Wishing you happy and safe holidays.  All the very best for an inspirational 2012.

We got so busy towards the end of the year and before the year is out we'd like to show you some of the things we did:

Painting whilst listening to Flight of the Bumblebee

Visiting the Elma Turner library

Contributing items to distribute to families at Christmas time in Nelson in conjunction with the Fifeshire Foundation and Pack the Bus

Skye received her award in Kowhai Assembly for her great guitar playing this year!

Some children took turns reading our Big Books to the class after morning tea

We "dug up" our time-capsules that we had made at the beginning of the year.  We were totally amazed at how we had grown and how much progress we had made with writing and drawing.  Some of us weren't able to read our writing from the beginning of the year!! 


 
Anna taught us about the role of a narrator.  We all dressed up and she narrated a play in which we all had a part.  It was great fun!


 
We had a fantastic time with the other children in the Kowhai Syndicate to mark the end of the school year at our Big Day Out at Founders Park
 

Bee Celebrations!

To celebrate our learning about bees and their importance in plant-animal-human relationships we made some honey biscuits and watched our digital story.  A big thank you to Skye's mum for organising the baking - the results were delicious!  We also watched The Magic Schoolbus episode "In a Beehive".  Here is the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZnCAYgOtnk

Sit back (perhaps with a piece of honey toast in hand) and enjoy watching a snapshot of our learning ...

Terracotta Angels

We went on a class trip to The Suter Art Gallery for a clay workshop at the end of November.  It was great fun and we made the most beautiful angels.  Esther taught us step by step how to roll out the clay (the thickness of a pencil), how to make patterns on the clay, how to cut out our shapes and how we needed to attach pieces of clay to each other by going "scratch, wet and wiggle"!

Shape Hunt

In Maths we are currently learning about shapes.  We began our topic by going on a shape hunt for shapes around the school.  We kept getting into different sized groups, eg. 6 groups each finding a square shape; 5 groups each finding a rectangle, etc. until we got to one group find a diamond!  The children enjoyed the shape hunt so much that several of them have continued their shape hunts at lunch times, sharing their findings when we get back to class.  The first day the shapes that were counted were recorded with ticks.  We discussed different methods of recording the shapes when we find them and it was decided that tally marks would enable us to count the number of shapes we have found far more effectively.

Grasshopper Tennis

It is very encouraging seeing how the children have improved in their tennis skills since last year.  On Tuesday Suzanne came to school to teach us some more skills.  We had a lot of fun playing games, particularly Goblins and Giants.  The games improved our co-ordination, as well as improving our social skills!

Make your own slideshow

Brilliant Bees

We have acquired a lot of knowledge about bees in a very short space of time.  Thank you to all the Room 12 families who are supporting the bee inquiry at home and bringing in items to share with the class.  So far we have tasted a few different types of honey and we have learnt some new facts; looked at bee toys; and listened to a wonderful story on how Dylan came to be(e)!!

At school we have also done an observation of bee activity around the different flowers we have at school; learnt about what attracts bees to flowers; how bees communicate; and we have had a visit from a beekeeper to answer some of our questions (which have included some really interesting ones, like, How do bees get their stripes? and Were bees around in the time of the dinosaurs?; as well as questions about numbers of bees that live in a hive; what role the queen bee plays; etc.)


Over the next couple of weeks Room 12 will be a hive of activity whilst we Use our knowledge (the next step in the SAUCE model of inquiry) to write a narrative based on We're Going on a Bear Hunt, changing the Bear to Bee! We will also be designing and making shadow puppets to act out our narrative.  The children will take photos of each shadow puppet scene, including using the macro function on the camera, and they will be recorded reading the narrative to fit the pictures.  We will amalgamate this digital story on MovieMaker.  In addition (following on from our honey label design) the children will be designing a book cover for "We're Going on a Bee Hunt".

Design

It was delightful to watch Room 12 create their own original designs from observing a flower this week.  Each child was given a flower to look at and think about before drawing it.  We were learning about using line, shape and colour.  Once they had completed their flower picture they thought about which shapes, lines and colours they liked the most and used them to create their own design on a different shaped paper.  Here are some of the results: