Term 1, Week 10

Cricket

This term we have been lucky enough to have John Muir come into school and share his cricket expertise with us. We have been learning about different cricket techniques by playing some awesome games. In Room 8 we have many talented cricket players!

On Wednesday this week, we learnt about how to bowl the ball in cricket. We learnt that it is important to hold the ball with your fingers and not with the palm of your hand and also to keep a straight arm when bowling. 

Our cricket super stars!

Term 1, Week 10

Word Work

Most mornings in Room 8 we participate in word work. Word work involves practicing our phonics and spelling. We start with word rumble where spelling words come up on our interactive board and we copy them on our own mini whiteboards. Sometimes we have to have very fast hands to write the long words quickly before they disappear! We then chant our alphabet names and sounds as well as our blends and digraphs. Each week we focus on one sound and we brainstorm as many of the words that we can that contain that sound - for example words have the short 'a' vowel sound (cat, mat, apple, and...). 

Word Rumble

Alphabet chart

Blends/digraphs chart

We use what we learn in word work to help us with our writing and reading.

Term 1, Week 9

Ruben the Road Safety Bear

We were lucky enough to be visited by Ruben the Road Safety Bear last Thursday. We had heaps of fun meeting Ruben and learning about how to keep ourselves safe on our roads.

Our Visual Mihi

In Room 8 our inquiry focus for this term has been 'My Voice is Powerful in Te Reo Maori'. We have each written our own mihi which is a greeting that acknowledges where you come from in Maori. After writing our mihi we used pastel on black paper to visually show three parts of our mihi - our maunga (mountain), awa (river), and whanau (family). We are very proud of where we come from and of our wonderful artwork.

Take a look!

Welcome to Room 8

Check out the cool kids of Room 8! We used pastels and crayons to create our beautiful self-portraits.

Term 4
In the very first week of the term we had the "Shake Out" day to practise what to do in an earthquake. We looked on the GeoNet sight and learned that there are hundreds of earthquakes every year in New Zealand but a lot of them we don't even feel!
Here we are at 9.15 ,doing what we need to do in case of an earthquake...

Then another week we had a "I wish I was..." day to raise funds for the Make-a-wish Foundation. We had heaps of fun and there were a lot of cool things that people wanted to be...

Week 5 Term 4 2015

It has been a while since our last post...Sorry!  So many things happening and lots of interuptions to our normal programmes.
Next week we are going to be entering items at the A and P show. One of the entries this year was decorated spoons. Mrs Finucane decided to use these characters to inspire some writing as well, and we got to show them briefly at assembly on Friday.
Here is what we said at assembly:

Mrs Finucane showed us some ideas. Some of us thought it would be hard but most of us thought we could manage it.

We had to use our imaginations and decide on a character.

We had to sketch out a plan and add the colours. We traced around the spoon first to get the right shape.

Then we had to paint our spoon. Some of us glued things on first. We needed 2 coats of paint.

Then we got the chance to decorate it! But Kathy and Mrs Finucane did the hot glue gunning.

We hope you like our wooden spoon characters!