Lantern Making

With the recent Whangarei Festival of Light and Art (FOLA) on at The Quarry Arts Centre, Rust Ave, the children from Rooms 1 and 2 created their own lanterns.
The process involved careful work with plenty of patience and cooperation. Both classes worked together and as you can see from the photos the children worked well in creating lanterns using the materials on hand.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Roll n Draw

Ms Higgins enjoys creating activities which encourage students to work and communicate well together. This group activity, Roll'n Draw was a result of watching how a student went about starting an oral language activity about drawing as a group. He began with a simple curve and Ms H thought "how effective". The idea is to have a number of simple shapes on a dice. These are starting shapes. Each group has a different leader each time and they start the drawing using this shape. Group members take turns or draw all at once. They decide together what the drawing is about. After only 10 minutes the groups share and comment on how they helped each other and shared ideas to get the drawing they have. Come back to check out the results in a future post. Meanwhile here are photos showing the fantastic sharing going on with the group members.

The 'All Blacks' collaborate on their masterpiece.

 

The 'Princesses' work on their creation.

The Importance of a Name.

 

 Room 1 had a special visitor this term, whaea Natasha, who helped us pronounce Maori words correctly. We played games and sang songs and had a really good time. Everyone completed a special display about our name for the classroom wall.

Heritage Park.
Room's 1, 2, 7 and 8 went to Heritage Park. These are some of our lasting impressions.

• 'At school you had to have your fingernails checked'
• 'The dirty children got scrubbed.'
• 'Baths were made of wood'
• There were no trousers for girls or shorts for boys.'
• 'Rich people had carriages.'
• 'Poor people walked.'
• 'The oxen's horns were on the wall.'
• 'There was a family burial plot.'
• 'Knuckle bones were made from real bones. It was a boy's game'
• 'Ring a rosy is over 400 years old.'
• 'We got to walk on stilts.'
• 'We a giant tug of war.'
• 'The first computer game was 'pong'.'

A big THANKS to all the parents who came to help. Room 1 are working on some thank-you letters for you.

Thank you cards

Hi Room 1,
Here's a snap of Victor reading his thank you cards. I took them to him on Father's day. Well done with having two paragraphs in your writing. Victor said that each letter was different. That goes to show what a great job you all did Room 1!
Ms H

A Visit from Victor.
Victor Green came in to Room 1 to let us know a little about the kind of things he did to have fun as a school aged child when he was growing up in Whangarei. He said he felt old at 21 as there were no ipads back then.

 

 He soon got talking about life in Auckland at Dilworth School where he was encouraged and required to take up lots of challenging and fun pastimes.

Room 1 listened so nicely to Victor when he explained what it was like to go to university after having been a teenager in Whangarei. Maybe people were thinking of the kinds of things they might like to do or study in the future.

His talk about his trip to Japan really had everyone thinking and it was great to see the places he went on our Interactive White Board.
Victor brought his saxophone to play so people could understand that by learning the recorder at primary school then other instruments could follow after.

Here are some photo's of Victor and of Room 1 and other seniors listening to his talk about Japan and saxophone playing.


P.S. Victor Green is Ms Higgins' son.

Asking Questions and Information Gathering.
What a lot of inspiration we have had so far this term.
Room 1 have been busy learning ways to find and organise important information so we can present some interesting answers for our questions about Toys and Pastimes of the past, present and future. The topic has really got us thinking, here are some of our questions;

When were string games invented and who played them in the old days?
 
When was play doh invented?

What were the playgrounds like in the old days?

When were skipping ropes invented and what games did they play with them?

What kind of toys were around in the old days?

When were spinning tops invented?

Were there such things as ipads in the old days?

What were toys and barbies made out of?

How did they make toys and barbies?

What games did they play in the old days?

So that we can answer these and other questions we are using a collection of family friendly websites.
Room 1 are learning to ask questions on the 'Ask Jeeves' website at the moment
Please follow this up at home if you are able. You might find other good sites to share with us at school.

Here's the link;

 http://www.wisekids.org.uk/Kids_safe_search_engines.htm