Week 1 of Term 2, a busy start to the term.

A new term has started and it is wonderful to see nearly all of our tamariki have returned to kura.

This week we read a text in Shared Reading called Pitcher Plants. We learned all about these intriguing carnivorous plants. Whaea Debb even brought in her pitcher plant from home. It was really cool to be able to see an actual live Pitcher Plant. 

For maths, we started learning about shapes for the Geometry strand. We learned about plane shapes (2 dimensional) and solid shapes (3 dimensional). We also built our own shapes using K-Nex.

For PE we had Sport Northland come and teach us some small ball skills games. We had to listen carefully to instructions and work in small teams.

Language Features card game

On Tuesday room 4 played a card game in class to learn about nouns, verbs, adjectives and conjunctions.

Firstly, we all sat together at the white table and Whaea Debb dealt out our cards. We were given 5 cards each. We worked with a buddy to make a sentence using the language features on the cards. Some of the sentences we made were funny. Such as, curly monkeys swing and dance. 

Next, we played memory. We put the cards face down on the table and took turns choosing 2 cards. We were trying to match the language features on the cards. Zaviah was the winner with 8 pairs and Kaitlin came second with 6 pairs.

Finally, we packed the cards away and went off to our desks to do some other work.

We really enjoyed learning about language features by playing this game.

Soil inquiry: Observations

We have been exploring our school to identify different soils and what their uses are. We found several different types. The ones we looked at more closely were sand, garden, soil and playground soil.  We noticed that the soil in the sandpit was gritty and felt rough when we rubbed it together in our hands.  We took a sample of each and put them into a jar and filled it with water. The next day we talked about our observations. We noticed lots of different things such as some bits were floating and others were settled on the bottom.

Topic Inquiry about soil

Our topic inquiry for this term is about soil. 

By the end of the unit: 

Students will be able to explain: 

What soil is and how soil is formed.

That soil is composed of different things.

The processes of soil formation.

What sort of soil is needed for healthy plants.

How to make soil more healthy for plants.

What we already know...

Discussing what we already know about plants and soil.

Think Pair Share

Our quiz results.