Tuesday

The Science Alive Cosmodome at Sacred Heart School today.  The children learned lots of information about the night sky including planets, stars, constellations, the international space station, and of course 'Matariki'.

Waiting to enter another universe! Unfortunately we could not take pictures inside but ask the children and they will tell you some of the many things we learned. A fantastic start to our study of Planet Earth and Beyond.

Monday

Today we had a visit from Sr Ann of the Mission Sisters. The Mission Sisters are marking 150 years of work in New Zealand. As they were the original teachers at Sacred Heart School we marked the occasion by planting a punga tree fern in our native garden. 

The children watched on while a child from each room helped bed in the punga.

Sr Ann then talked about her work with children in schools in the Philippines and Cambodia.

A busy Friday

Today we further developed our P.E. skills with Steve from Kelly sports. This is the second of 4 lessons which will help the children develop some early soccer skills.

We also made beautiful prayer flags for Nepal. The children chose a Kiwiana image to put on each flag along with a message of hope, peace, love or happiness. The flags will hang outside our room for the next week and then we will send them to a school in Nepal. Come in and see our work.

Term 2

 Learning about the letter j J this week.

We coloured the shape of the letters j J.

Then we cut out our letters and glued them to bright paper so we could see the letter shape.

Excitement ++

Today saw the junior children arriving at school dressed in a bright array of 'dress-up' clothes. In Room 1 we had Buzz Lightyear, Woodie, several Spiderman, Superman, Arial and Princess Sophia. As well as an aspiring Hulk and Green Arrow.
All children could explain why they had chosen their dress-up character and what was special about them.  This experience was excellent motivation for writing and most of the children attempted to write 2 or 3 sentences with teacher support. So well done everyone!

 

   


The other exciting news from our room today is that our first butterfly has emerged from its chrysalis - and it's a girl! If you don't know how to tell the difference between a male and female monarch butterfly then ask your children.  They are sure to know by now. We watched as it dried its wings and prepared to fly. Jamien was the lucky one to carry the butterfly outside  as it flew onto his leg.

                               




We have completed our short movies of Little Red Riding Hood and Brave Father Mouse. So  now we will wait for Mrs Williams to return to school so she can show us how to load them onto this blog for you to watch.

Pyjama day

Just a reminder to parents/caregivers that our pyjama day has been re-scheduled for Thursday this week.  When we were planning these fun days for writing, we did not take into consideration that Ash Wednesday would fall on one of these days! I hope you all got the notice pinned to you child's bag this afternoon.

Last Friday morning we had the first of our Discovery Learning sessions. These sessions are built around the Key Competency for Term 1 - Using language, symbols and texts. We had 2 activities for the children to take part in.  Some children took the story of Little Red Riding Hood and created Granny's cottage complete with wardrobe, bed, blankets etc. All that remains is for these children to gather foliage to make the forest and the set will be ready for their storytelling.  We will use the iPads to record their images and oral story telling.  The second group of children took the story of Brave Father Mouse.  They made the main characters - Father Mouse and the Cat - and will use these to tell the story. So watch this space for preliminary photos and later the little film.

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.