Year 5 ski day

Awesome video courtesy of Mr. Oregan :)

Year 6 ski day

Amazing video courtesy of Mr. Marston

From the very top of the world!

Rough day out.

Blogger of the Week

In an endeavour to encourage the class to blog more frequently and to increase the quality of blogging, I'm introducing 'Blogger of the week'. They can win this awesome and super snazzy digital badge for their blog and can be featured here on our class blog to gain more 'hits' on their blogs. Yay.

Planting a Legacy

This Term has started with a bang. We've been lucky enough to have two tree planting experiences already. Our first was up the Grampians where we are planting trees to help the Brook Waimarama Sanctuary develop a 'Halo effect' (a safety net of native fruiting trees for the birds when they fly out of the Sanctuary). We had fun sliding around in the mud and planted one big podocarp or beech tree each.

 Rick from the Sanctuary pointed out this Kingfisher or Kotare on the way up to plant our trees. 

Happy tree planters

Next, we were lucky enough to get a bus up to the top of Piper's Reserve where we have been planting trees for four years now. It was lovely to see previous year's trees growing up big and strong. The kids were able to plant as many trees as they could in the hour provided. What a great day out!

 Great view from the top!

 Happy looking trees

Mucking in:)

Our Maths Mini Olympics

Our Makey Makey fun

Oblio's Space Rap

You're Invited

STEAMS Day

The Senior school has kicked off what we hope will become regular events. 'STEAMS' days are there to provide extra support in our classroom practice around the teaching and learning in key curriculum areas that are sometimes given less emphasis in the Primary school classroom. STEAMS is an interpretation of 'STEM' which stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths. We have added the 'A' for Arts and 'S' for Social Studies. 

 Freya and Sharmaine get ready to make some 'Stixplosions'.

 Jessie and Lucie coding an Mbot through a maze.

There was an amazing variety of activities on offer for the day. Students were exploding things, making things, coding things, building things, destroying things, sciencing things, experimenting with things, acting out things. It was a really great day:)

We are on the lookout for any parental expertise in any of the STEAMS areas; where you might be able to lead a small group of students for an hour and a half block. Our next STEAMS day is on the 22nd of June. 

Our First Mystery Hangout

I recently met an Auckland teacher who has had his class participating in 'Mystery Hangouts'. His class had been 'skyping/Hangouting' with classes around the world and he asked if my class would like to have a go. In a nutshell, you agree on a set time to 'hangout' and then through a series of questions that can only be answered by 'yes' and 'no' you guess where each school is in the world.

The class loved the experience and there was a great buzz in the room as the children rushed to consult google maps and pass information onto the questioners etc.
Each child had a set role in the hangout. We had welcomers, questioners, Google mappers, runners, trackers, managers, Googlers, videographers, bloggers....

I loved how the Hangout meant that we had to work as a class to solve the problem. My favourite quote coming from the mappers who would shout out in gusto "I need a runner"(to convey information to the questioners). We developed key geographical and mapping skills and we had fun doing it!

 Photographing and filming the experience. 

Important mapping information being passed on. 

We are keen to try this again and I am in the process of organising some schools that are further afield than Auckland.