Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Maths Oral language

 Every Thursday we practice explaining how we work out our maths problems.  We try to find out as many different ways as we can to work out the problem and explain what strategy we have used.  Then we work out which is the most efficient.  We are also able to check that we have the right answer by making sure we use at least two different strategies.  Have a look at the last two problems and some of the strategies we came up with.



Monday, August 15, 2011

Makaela's Crystal

We tried out the new Mimio viewer in our classroom.  It let the whole class look close-up at Makaela's crystal.






Makaela and Tobias wrote these wonderful stories about it:
My Crystal
On the weekend I made crystals that look like the moon in the sky with lots of stars.  They are like blue hedgehogs dancing in the moonlight.  My crystals shine like a thousand stars in the sky.  They are like snowflakes falling on me.  They look like lollies covered in sugar.  Tiny blue lights shining up at the sky.  I made my crystals out of magnesium salt and for a little bit of colour I added food colouring.

Makaela's Crystal
In the weekend Makaela made some crystal out of hot water, magnesium salt, and blue food colouring.  The blue colour makes the crystal stand out lots.  The crystal looks crispy and shiny.  It is thin, spiky and sparkles when the light hits it.  I would like to have a go at making a crystal.

Thursday, August 11, 2011

Fruit Platter

Today the Year 4's in Rooms 13 and 14 went to learn how to play golf.
The Year 3's worked with Anna.
We made a fruit platter because as part of the Home Play Challenge the character Spoke loves fruit kebabs. If you don't have kebab sticks you can make a fruit platter instead.
We had mandarins, kiwifruit, pears, apples and bananas.
 
We cut the fruit up or peeled it. Anna had to cut up the kiwifruit, apples and pears because they needed a sharp knife.
 
This is what our fruit platters looked like. Don't they look delicious!
  
They tasted good.
The kiwifruit was the first fruit to vanish! The bananas were very popular too.
After we had finished eating we went to the Kitchen Garden and put our fruits scraps into the compost bins.
Thank you Sonja and Anna for getting the yummy fruit for us. Maybe you could make a fruit platter at home with your family.

Moving Sand

The PTA kindly got lots of sand for Kowhai and Totara Team's sandpit.  The truck dumped all the sand outside the sandpit.  Dugan asked us if we would help move it into the Kowhai sandpit.  We all worked hard and quickly got the job done.  Didn't we do well?

Here we are making sand castles when we had finished the job.