Merry Christmas!!!

It was our last day of school for the year today and now we are on holiday until January 31st.  When we get back there will be a new bunch of children in A3.  It has been a great year and we have had a lot of fun together.  Thanks to everyone who has supported our blog this year.   Wally has promised to update the blog with tales of his holiday, so stay posted for his updates.  We wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a happy New Year. 

Gavin

Gavin has been working hard to learn the letters in his name.  Yesterday in his own time, and all by himself,  he used the magnetic letters to write his name on the white board.  Great work Gavin!

Catch it if you can

We have been reading the poem Catch it if you can.  It's about cooking pancakes so on Friday we decided to make some pancakes of our own. 

 Sandy, Noelani and Ennie have written stories about the pancake experience:

Tui Garden Challenge

A3 and A1 have entered the Tui Gardening challenge and on Monday we started getting our gardens ready.  We pulled out all of the weeds and old plants from our garden beds.  As part of the garden challenge we were given new gardening tools and these were very helpful to pull out the plants.  

Ashley with some of our new tools

One of our gardens before we weeded it.

Take a look at this slide show to see the children hard at work.
   

Four of the children wrote and recorded stories about their gardening experience so far. 

Dinosaur Prints

Last week we were very busy working on  dinosaur prints. It was a lot of work but we love the results. We made two different prints.  For the first one we chose one colour of ink to use, then we used dye and creative glue to add detail to the picture.  For our second print we were allowed to chose two different colours of ink.  Take a look at our slide show and let us know what you think.

Untitled from Kirsty Macfarlane on Vimeo.

Maths Week

Last week was maths week.  Each day we worked in groups to solve a different maths problem.  Some of the problems were quite tricky and we enjoyed the challenge of solving them. 

Here is Aliyaah, Ofa and Noelani telling us how they solved the following problem:

Mother Bear is making her 5 bear cubs new coats.  The coats have 3 buttons each. How many buttons does Mother Bear need?

We also used paint to copy a picture of a robot using shapes.  Take a look at the slide show to see the results. 

Monster Mash

We have been reading 'The Monster's Party' by Joy Cowley and we decided to have our own monster mash. We made monster masks and played charades, musical chairs and pin the hat on the monster.  After we had finished the games we ate lots of jelly!  

 

Here are some photos of the scary monsters at play. 

We also made a sound scape to match what was happening in the story.  We had to think of sounds that matched the story and then we added actions.  We hope you like it. 

New faces in A3

We have had four new children join us this term, Paultana, Terry, Han lin and Gavin. We are taking good care of them and we think they are going to have a great time in our class. 

Paultana loves playing with Chester.

Terry and Han Lin like to do puzzles.

Gavin enjoys playing on the computer.