Happy New Year and welcome back to our class blog for 2015.

We welcome Ondrej, Richard, Edward & Hercz to Room 1 and to Sacred Heart School.  

We have been super busy in Room 1 re-establishing classroom routines, beginning instructional reading groups, filling the knowledge gaps in maths so we can move on to teach simple addition and subtraction strategies, and gathering baseline information about writing skills.

Maths time - learning about ordinal numbers

                           
                             

                                       

                                         
 

    

              Writing motivation - hiding from the wind!

This year we really want to work hard to develop the children's writing skills. Here at school, we have organised a series of fun activities that the children can use as motivation and sources of inspiration for their writing.  We ask that you give your children every opportunity at home to write their ideas down on paper. If you can, it would be really helpful for the children to access to scrap paper to write on and felt pens, coloured pencils or crayons to write with.

Today the Junior School held the first of our motivating activities. We held a Teddy Bears picnic complete with games and activities and tiny teddy biscuits to munch on.  We saw a great array of soft toys of all kinds having all kinds of fun in the playground.
       

                      

                         

                            

                                

                                

Term 4

Term 4 began with a hiss and a roar for all aspects of our life at school - except for this blog! As you will have noticed we have not made any entries this term but not through laziness but rather due to a technical glitch with Google Chrome.
Anyway we headed off to swimming at 11.30am each day.  The children really enjoyed their lessons and everyone made excellent progress over the 2 week of teaching.   Thank you to all the Mums and Dads who helped with the dressing and supervision of the children.

        

                                            
We also managed to fit in Reading, Maths, Writing, Religious Education and 30 minutes of Athletics practice. The children were very tired so it was great to have a long weekend.   The children wrote some fantastic stories about how much they loved swimming. These were presented to the tutors on the last day of our lessons.  Mrs Sleeman was also impressed by the standard of the children ideas, their drawings and their writing. All children received a Principal's award sticker from Mrs Sleeman to recognise their efforts.

I will post more tomorrow with pictures of the Athletics day events.

The Term so far!

This post contains photos of our work this term.  It shows some of the children listening to instructions given by others using Yuan's FM device.
 

                                     

The children making a human model of the way our ears hear sound and how our brains make sense of sound.

                                     

 'Strike' concert. A touring group from 'Strike' a leading New Zealand percussion group gave the children a fantastic introduction to the unit of work on Sound.

                                                       

                         

Playing the musical instruments they made during the Technology Unit. 

 

We have also had a visit from a family of rabbits!!

                                 

                                  

                                  

Hello again

Apologies for the lack of 'blogging' over this term.  My husband and I are now back in our 'temporary' home and have our internet connection up an running again. So please keep looking at our blog to see and hear about all the great things we are doing at school.

We have children making excellent progress in reading and writing, others are progressing well with number recognition and addition and subtraction - hopefully getting the hang of  'imaging' this rather than relying on counters and fingers. This week we have been interchanging with Room 2. Room 1 people are making pan flutes and harmonicas while the children going to Room 2 are making castanets and xylophone from bottles.

More soon with some pics!

Week 6

We had a busy time during Week 6.

Writing continued to be linked to our Science topic.  We made traffic light jelly with red, green and yellow jellies. We added apple and banana to each layer. On Thursday afternoon we ate our jelly with the ice-cream we made 2 week ago. Everyone tried vanilla, plum and cookies n cream ice creams.

                                   

Week 6 was also the last week for the Number strand in Mathematics.  All the children have had their assessment data updated and this will be shared with you at the upcoming parent interviews.

We also had our last drama lesson on Tuesday. Hopefully I will be able to add some photos up later this week.

Some of the children went on a nature walk around the playground with Mrs Redmond. They found all sorts of things to add to our Prayer table. This was a nice introduction to the Religious Education strand of God our Creator' for these children. Friday 20th June is our Prayer Service in the Church at 12 midday. God our Creator will be our theme.  The children each have a line to learn and say at the Prayer Service.

Friday was very busy. Lachlan started school and he looked absolutely like a very grown up school boy in his new school uniform and school shoes.  A big welcome to you Lachlan and a very warm welcome to your family. We hope you have many happy times at school.

Elissa visited school for half a day too. We did enjoy your company and hope you had a great time.

Wednesday

We have been very busy since our last post. It is great to see the children learning new skills. This week we have seen everyone acquire new learning in Reading, Writing and Maths.

I have put a link from our blog page to the Starfall website. If you click on this link you will be able to help your child with phonics and number practice at home.

At the end of last week the children learned to take photographs using our class digital camera. We took photographs of things we noticed in our playground - and some even took photos of other children taking photos!

            

            

On Friday, everyone took home a pair of hand knitted slippers. These were kindly knitted by an elderly lady from our Sacred Heart Parish. The children were able to choose the colour they liked the best. Every child has also been given a warm winter hat to wear in the playground to keep their heads and ears warm.

On these cold mornings we have also been learning some new warming up exercises. This has created lots of laughter, with Hey Baby, Lets Rock and Roll being the class favourite.

Our Kitchen Chemistry unit is continuing to create interest.  Today we made butter by shaking cream in a jar until all the butter fat clumped together.  We drained off the water and spread the butter on to crackers. We really enjoyed our snack.  Mrs Gibson and Mrs Sleeman thought it was the best butter -EVER!  On Friday we will share our butter with children in Room 2.  They will be making bread for us and we will make butter for them.  We will eat our bread and butter together!

              

               

               

               

Tomorrow is Syndicate sports so please remember to bring a change of shoes and sports clothes to school. Also a reminder that the school sports shorts are still available from the School Office at a well discounted price.