We have finished the year with shared lunch and gifting the trees we made in the last few weeks.

Let the pictures speak for themselves.

During term 4 we have been looking into a value of Respect.  To summarise our learning we have been setting different challenges this week. Yesterday, we cleaned school’s grounds to show respect for our school. Today, we sorted some things in our classroom such as desks, stationery and other resources.  We learned more about showing respect towards people by listening and keeping promises.

One of the groups were reading a book about the rocks. Students got really interested in where the rocks came from and they were different.  We examined our rock collection. A few students noticed air bubbles in different rocks.  Naturally, we wanted to experiment with the sinking or floating properties of rocks and objects.  Students made predictions but some of their questions were still not answered. They engaged in their own research to solve some of the unknown.

Recently, Room 18 has been exploring NZ History. We were learning about the life on Pa sites before the arrival of other cultures.  Today, we recreated these early defence villages out of natural resources.  It’s been great to hear specific language and see full engagement during this creative team work outside.

Kia Ora!

I’m Antonia van den Berg, and I have been the student teacher in Room 18 for the last 5 weeks! It has been an absolute pleasure teaching your children thus far 🙂

Last week the students were tasked with collaborating to come up with a restaurant theme and designing a menu with dishes which complimented the theme. They had a blast and came up with some very creative ideas and dishes. The learning was project-based, and extended into other areas such as Art, Reading and Physical Education. This is beneficial to learning as it allows them to understand how subject matter relates all the way through different disciplines.

We have attached pictures for you to look through and appreciate the work that was done by the students,

Enjoy!

Antonia

We have been experimenting with writing directions or instructions. We have realised they need to be clear, ordered and specific.

After writing instructions on how to draw and play Hopscotch, today was about testing each other’s instructions and giving feedback.  This did mean that some of our instructions needed editing or recrafting to make them clearer.

We have been exploring how our brains work, and talking about things we can do to control our brain, rather than our brain controlling us when things get challenging.

For an experiment to see how we would cope, we were given the task to jointly draw a described scene with our buddy. We could not talk to each other, had to both show control over the one pen, and manage our emotions while we did this. This also meant we had to give up some control over what we were creating too. Interestingly, we did one picture with us both using our drawing hand, and one picture with us both using our non-drawing hand.

Judge for yourself how you think we coped.

The students chose their own topics whilst engaging in the construction of their mini-movies.