Week 6 Summary

This week Josh managed to break his arm whilst doing some fancy moves on the bars. He is the second Rm 24 student to do this! Hope you are feeling better soon Josh.

Emily, Satori, Connor, Connor, Bridget and Te Iwa enjoyed 3 PE extension sessions with Mr McKenzie. We are looking forward to them teaching us the new frisbee game they learnt.

This week we have completed our calendar art - make sure you come and see it in the school office and place your orders for cards, calendars and diaries.

We have been working really hard on transferring our non fiction mammal reports into scripts for an oral report using ICT. Some of us have chosen to make a documentary style tv show and others are making imovies with voice overs. We are working in groups and hope to be finished next week so look out for these great pieces of work in our blog soon.

In art this week we completed some fantastic scrafitto work, drawing our head and shoulders first then using pastel to colour it. This was then covered in a thin coating of black paint. When it was dry we scratched the paint away using a pin, carefully ruling thin lines in various directions to reveal out faces. We are really proud of our work.

On Friday we took part in the coin trail for Daffodil day. Not many of us appear to have a great deal of yellow clothing but we were happy to contribute to such a great cause and after a quick discussion discovered that nearly all of us have had someone close to us affected by cancer. It was brilliant to hear later in the day that just over $700 was raised. It was awesome to see Satori and Connor performing their Jump Jam routine too, looking good boys!

Runathon Fundraiser

Our fundraiser for Camp was a great success with all students who participated running their little hearts out! It was a cold winter's day but that didn't stop them giving 100% effort. It was great to see the students encouraging each other as they ran around the course again and again and again! Be proud of yourselves and the superb effort you all gave. We are all looking forward to camp so much and it's great that the majority of you were able to reduce the cost of this through your fundraising efforts.

Here is a video of the event

Week 5 Summary

We have had a busy week in Rm 24. Most of us have now completed our written mammal reports on the laptops and these are displayed in the classroom. We are now working on presenting this new knowledge orally in the form of an imovie or video.

On Tuesday we were meant to have our run-athon but the weather was so bad it was postponed till Thursday. We all ran really well and have raised lots of money to bring the cost of camp down.

We have continued to work on our penguins made from plastic bottles. We have finished painting them and stuck on the eyes and beaks etc

We were really disappointed that our final day of winter sport at Hagley park was cancelled but it has been a good week working on our reports and penguins

Written by Renee

Drama Fun

Team 24 love drama. Lately we have enjoyed playing both Park Bench and Taxi. Both games provide an opportunity for 'thinking on your feet' - Fantastic for confidence, oral language and always guaranteed to give us a laugh. This clip shows the kids playing Taxi where we set up a car and have 3 passengers seated. A driver starts off a conversation which then indicates to the passengers which type of vehicle he/she is driving (could be a police car, pizza delivery, boy racers, taxi, tour bus, mum driving kids home from school and the list goes on....) We have a line of 'drivers ready to go and after 30-40 seconds the next driver in line yells out 'Taxi' This means the present driver has to get out and the new driver begins a new conversation hopefully changing the scene completely. Check out a wee selection of last weeks efforts at 'Taxi'

Our Mihi

As part of our Maori Language programme we have learnt a basic mihi and presented it to the class. While we struggled with a few of the correct pronouciations we did a pretty awesome job overall. Here are a selection of the students who were brave enough to be filmed for the blog.

Week 4 Summary

This week has been as busy as always. I am finding it hard to keep updating this blog so am handing the job over to my PA! One of our classroom jobs each week is PA. They take the absence book over each morning, answer the phone and do any other notices that I may need them to do. Now their job will include a blog update in the form of a summary of the week's happenings in Room 24. This one for week 4 will give them all an idea of what I would like......

Our Reading focus has been non fiction and the written focus is report writing so we havechosen a mammal each and are presently researching information to complete a written report on this mammal. They kids have spent time on the laptops this week and are getting much better at note taking and transferring this in to their own words. We had to have discussions on plagiarism!

Once the written reports are completed we will be making imovies with voice overs and video documentaries on our mammals as part of our ICT programme and oral language.

Heke, Josh and Josh hard at work

We can't all have a laptop all the time - amazing what you can find

out from books too!

We have been making great progress with our papier mache penguins. All a little sick of it now actually and ready to paint! After 4 layers of newspaper we were able to cut out and attach cardboard feet, flippers and a beak. Then a final layer of newsprint was added to make the paint application easier.

Thanks for drinking all that fizzy! The first layers go on....

Layers 3 and 4.....

beak, feet and flippers attached - Bridget's ready

to paint on Monday

With Friday's sport cancelled it was time to start on our Annual Calendars for the PTA. These make wonderful Christmas gifts and this year diaries and greeting cards will also be on sale. We had a class discussion on the 'theme' for this year. Hmmm... very mixed ideas - so we came up with quite a 'mixed' design! You can look forward to viewing your child's masterpiece in a few weeks time! Here is a little selection of the first step - taking photos.......

Our Inquiry into Antarctica is coming along. It has been fascinating tracking the temperature at the South Pole compared with Christchurch and viewing a couple of video clips of the the researchers down in Antarctica coping in the extreme weather. We have looked at the early explorers and the hardships they faced. Next week we will discover more closely NZ's link to the area and the role we play there. After exploring the different jobs people from NZ do in Antarctica I will be asking the kids to apply for a position. Should be interesting...

The girls completing a timeline of early explorers with a little help from Google

Goodbye Ji-Yeong

We had to say goodbye to our Korean student teacher on Thursday. It was great having Ji-Yeong with us for 2 weeks and we enjoyed learning how to write our names in Korean. Ji-Yeong gave us all some Korean sweets when she left. We hope she will email is when she returns to Korea next week.

Korean Topic

On Wednesday Ji-Yeong taught us a little bit about Korea. She showed us where Korea was on a map.

And we saw South Korea's capital Seoul photo.

She also showed us what kind of food people eat in Korea.

This is called 'Bi bim bap'

We talked about Korean traditional clothes called 'Han bok'

And we talked about Korean alphabet called 'Han gul'

We got to colour in the Korean flag called 'Tae geuk gi'

The white background symbolizes peace. The red and blue circle means creation of the universe. The four groups of bars around the circle symbolize heaven,earth,water and fire.

We have really enjoyed having Ji-Yeong in our class for the last two weeks. We wish her all the best for her future teaching career. Good luck Ji-Yeong

Written by Olivia

Welcome Ji-Yeong

This morning St Albans School welcomed 3 student teachers from Korea. They are all second year students studying at University to become Elementary school teachers. Team 24 are delighted to host Ji-Yeong Park for the next two weeks.

We started the day with a powhiri in Room 11 which you can see a short movie from below. Ji-Yeong was very brave in taking part and singing in Korean for us. We hope she will have time to teach us about some Korean culture and traditions.

Welcome Ji-Yeong, it is so nice to have you in Room 24 with us!