A creative term.

What a fantastically expressive and creative term we have had!

Our highlights:

• Folk dancing for our parents and visitors, especially doing the Bird Dance with them.
• The arts rotation with all the Year 2 classes.
• Using paint and dye to produce our insects for Calendar Art.
• Designing and creating peg dolls with the help of Mrs M. (thank you!)
• Painting our clay leaves and other objects we produced last term.
• Performing our folk dances for Miss Downham and our big buddies in room 23.
• Watching Room 23's original creative dances (some very cool moves!)
• Walking around the school art trail and seeing some fabulous artworks.
• Admiring our painted insects put into one mosaic and watching with excitement as the bids for it got higher!
• Using colour, shape and various painting techniques to create abstract artworks.

We have expressed ourselves in so many different ways this term, it has been awesome!

Express Yourself, September

Our inquiry this term has been based around the arts, and we have been expressing ourselves in all sorts of different ways. In our arts rotation we have participated in dance, drama, percussion, flax weaving and learning about the instruments of the orchestra. Mrs Franklyn has come into all the year 2 classes to share her knowledge and instruments with us. We loved trying to blow the trumpet (some of our faces turned bright red because it is so tricky!) and using the bow on her small sized violin. We felt very lucky to have Mrs Franklyn visit us and played her a thankyou song called "Rhythmic Room 9 had a Band" Can you name all the percussion instruments you see us playing?

Clean up for the Cup, September

Phew! We worked hard at school to clean up all the rubbish around our area so that when the Rugby World Cup visitors arrived we had helped to make our community look tidy. We picked up any rubbish that had been dropped or had blown into our school playgrounds, and walked down to Pah Road and tidied that up too. Kiri from Maori Television came to korero to us and she thought we had done a tino pai job! She reminded us that we need to clean-up all the time, not just when we are expecting visitors. Kiri is passionate about keeping New Zealand clean, and we think that is a great idea and will do our best to be tidy kiwis.

Athon Day in July

We had such a busy day! The whole school was involved in activities for our -athon day, which was all about learning things to do with the Rugby World Cup which is being played here in New Zealand right now! We did lots of different things, including a knowledge quiz, making a "mini me" rugby player, a school jump jam session and working interdependantly with a small group to produce a rugby scene made from playdough. Look at all the different ideas we came up with...

End of term 3

Safe Walking

We had a good finish to another term. We had Constable Jamieson in to remind us about safe walking while we are out and about in the holidays.He reminded us to "Stop. Look. Listen." We need to stop before we cross the street and look both ways to see if there is any traffic.We also have to listen for vehicles, especially down "sneaky driveways" when we are on the footpath.We listened carefully to Constable Jamieson and will do our best to remeber the safety rules so we have a safe time these holidays.

Busy busy

Term one is nearly finished and we have an awesome group of Superkids in room 9 this year! 
We have had lots to keep us busy, and lots to learn about:
Our inquiry focus has been based on "New Zealand Rocks!" and we have learnt a lot about the many different cultures that make up our junior school roll. We made passports and flew to some of those countries to spend some time learning about them, for example : in China we used chopsticks, in Australia we made boomerangs and in Samoa we made a tapa cloth design. We are so lucky to have people from all around the world in our school... I guess that is what makes ROPS rock!

New learning

I have decided to learn about blogging and am attempting to start a blog site for the children in room 9 to use. Let's hope I get the hang of it! :)