Miner Huts

We took our new findings from our school trip last Thursday and sketched the miner's huts from the Chinese Village. We wrote poems about what we noticed while we looked at them.

We had to make sure they painted a picture for our reader. We included:

• Strong verbs to make things do something
• Nouns (naming words)
• Adjectives to describe our naming words (nouns)

Some of us had time to publish them yesterday and get them up on the wall to share.

Gold Trip Video

Arrowtown Gold Trip

On Thursday Yr 3-6 drove to Arrowtown as part of our tuning in stage for our gold inquiry.
We had a fun filled day of finding out new information, asking questions and experiencing what it was like to be a miner 150 years ago.

The year 3's started off with gold panning in the Arrow River with Denise. We now know what it was like for the miners a long time ago...our feet were numb! 23 out of 28 children found a piece of of gold.

Next we walked to the Arrowtown Museum where we sorted different artifacts from the oldest to the newest. This gave us a good picture of what happened before, during and after the gold rush.
We were lucky enough to have a quick walk around the museum before heading out for lunch.

Last stop was a stroll around the Chinese Village. We had a look through Ah Lum's store. Ah Lum was a chinese miner who looked after other miners gold in his safe. He also had beds for miners and stored food such as pickled lemons and tea.

Then it was back on the bus to school. We are looking forward to sorting our new information and coming up with new wonderings about the gold rush.

Jerome Kavanagh

On Wednesday we were lucky to get a visit from Jerome Kavanagh. He came to talk to us about traditional Maori instruments. We made a Porotiti. It is a wind instrument.

We needed to work together to get them made. we needed string, card, pencil, nail, ruler and scissors. When we got back to class we decorated them in different colours and designs.

When we made them, it was important to get the holes in the middle to make it balanced.

Here is a photo of our Porotitis.

Bus Stop

Today we did a bus stop activity. We went around different 'bus stops' that had a picture of some old tools. We wondered what were in the pictures and wrote down what we thought, what we predicted they were and any questions we had. We hope to find out soon what they are all about!

Netbook learning

We are very lucky to have 4 new netbooks in Room 7 this year. It takes a bit to learn how to use them but gradually we have been learning new skills each day. Here are some photos of a maths group using them to create bar graphs.

Our new comprehension strategy this week...

We have another strategy to learn and remember when we are reading. These comprehension strategies help us understand what we are reading. This week it is all about predicting. This means we need to guess what happens throughout the story and find clues that help us with this guess. Sometimes we may change our predictions!

Room 7's Modiglianis!

We have been looking at the famous artist Modigliani. He is famous for his portraits. We noticed that all of his portraits are long in shape, have long necks, faces and noses, and show the top of their shirt. We also noticed that he uses plain colours on black paper. We decided to use oil pastels. Here are some of our own Modigliani portraits. Make sure you visit the art section at the Wanaka A&P Show next weekend as they will be up on display.

Reading

We are now underway with our reading programme. Some of us are learning different strategies to work out those tricky words and some of us are learning different comprehension strategies and developing our skills in this area. So look out for special bookmarks that come home in the readers now and then. You can keep these to remind you and your child what we are learning to do within reading. This week we are looking at the strategy of Skippy Frog and discussing the main idea.

Nick Willis

Last week we had a visit from Olympic athlete Nick Willis. He talked to us about his training for the 1500m and what it was like to win gold and silver medals for New Zealand.

He had many messages for for us to take away with us.

"He told us that our meals need lots of different colours"

"We can be anything we want to be"

"We need to work hard to achieve our goals"

He took the the children on a run around the school grounds. His advice is going to be good for when we are training for our school triathlon.

Welcome to 2012 in Room 7!

Hello everyone and welcome back to school!

Room 7 has been busy getting to know one another for the past 7 days. We have 20 children this term.

Here is a photo of our class. Can you spot someone you know?

Room 7 created a spider web that showed how we are all unique. We had to pass the ball of string to different people around the circle to create it. It shows that we all have differences.

Come and read why everyone in Room 7 is so unique. It is displayed on our classroom wall.

We hope you enjoy our visiting our blog this term!