Welcome Welcome One and All!

Today was a very busy day.  The year 3s from room 12 joined us today.  It was very exciting to have so many of our friends from other places with us.
We started off writing Diamante poems about our dreams for the future.  We thought about the kinds of people we are now and also the kind of people we would need to be if we wanted to do our dream job.  Here are some of our poems:

Kane

Clever Cool

Sleeping greeting meeting

When I grow up I want to be

Disturbing detecting infecting

chemistry scientific

Scientist

Dylan

Happy Tired

Running Laughing Playing

When I grow up I want to be

Landing Flying Rescuing

Brave Skillful

Westpac Pilot

Max

Kind Nice

Playing fighting catching

When I grow up I want to be

Catching speeding shouting

Brave fast

Police

This afternoon we looked at pictures of maraes and learned some of the names of different parts of the building.  Please remember that tomorrow we are leaving for the Orakei Marae so we must not be late!

Daydreaming IS allowed!

Today we have started to think about our new topic: Dreams.  Not the sleeping kind of dreams but dreams for the future.  Next term we will be thinking about the Olympic Games in London and all the personal effort each athlete had to make to get there.  We decided that athletes probably started training and making plans when they were very young.

We started to think about what our own dreams for the future.  We thought of a list of different jobs that we would love to do and then thought about what kind of people did those jobs.  For example, dancers need to be fit, doctors need to be clever and All Blacks need to be strong and practice every day!

Here are a few of our pictures.

Finished Video

Here is our finished video for Bardwell school in England.  We will send them a video but we decided to post it on the blog as well because we are so proud of it.  It isn't perfect, there a few mistakes, but we think it's not bad for our first movie!

There once was a class from Parnell...

Today we have been using rhyming words to help us write some limericks.  We found out that Limericks have a special rhyme pattern.  It goes like like this:

A limerick always has 5 lines.  Lines 1,2 and 5 have the same rhyme and lines 3 and 4 have a different rhyme:

We realised that limericks don't always make sense but that's ok. However, they should try and make you laugh.  

Here are some of our efforts...

Lily's Limerick

There once was a girl who was silly

And a new boy called Billy

They always had kisses

But he always misses

A girl called Lily

Terri's Limerick

The boy likes to Zap

The boy zapped his cap

He used some glue

it was very blue

Afterwards he took a nap

Cameron's Limerick

There were 1000 bugs

In each of our mugs

They were smashing

And they were bashing

Like thugs in giant jugs

Rhyme Time

Today we have been learning how to use words that rhyme.  We read some poems and found words with the same sound.  We looked at what part of the word makes the rhyming sound.  We also found out that a word doesn't need to have the same spelling for it to rhyme, like with 'Runny Honey'.  We listed a few together and then we investigated to find some more.

We used our favourite rhymes that we found and wrote them into sentences, we also made origami butterflies with the rhyming words on each wing.

 For spelling this week we looked at how the sound 'ORT' is in lots of different words but is spelled in lots of different ways.  
Here are the words we could think of, can you think of any more?

Our First Movies

Today it was our first day making movies.  We took pictures from places in NZ and added them to our voices using movie maker. 

Some people found it quite tricky because we had to have two windows open and move files from one place to another. It was quite easy to forget where you put things! 

 Some people found it easy so they tried to help other people.  But even though it was quite hard, most people enjoyed doing it.  

 We will finish them off next week, but here are just a few to watch for now.

We hope you like them...

Making Movies

This morning we wrote some information reports about places that we know in New Zealand.  We then recorded ourselves reading them.  We also painted some pictures of the place.  Tomorrow we will put all of our work together to make a movie to send to Bardwell school in England. 

This is Xanthe's work and an example of how our finished movie will look.

This afternoon we started to learn our times tables, starting with the 2x tables because lots of us had this as a goal on our reports.  We played some doubling and halving games and sang a 2x table song.  Most of us enjoyed it and can't wait to sing the other songs.

Letters from England!

 

Today we got some letters from Bardwell school.  Bardwell School is a school in England and where Mr. Miller's nephew, Alex, goes. We were really excited and impressed by all of the things they said and we decided to write back to them.

It was really interesting to find out about life and school in another country.  We found out that a lot of the things that they liked to do, like art, ICT and soccer, were things that we  liked to do too.  It was nice to find out that we had so much in common!

 

Later on this week we will write some information reports about what life is like in New Zealand and at Parnell and we will send that too.  We decided it would be quite good fun to present some of our reports and record them onto a DVD!

For spelling this week we looked at words that ended in -tion.  We were impressed by how many we knew already, almost 40!  And we chose 10 of these to learn for a test on Friday.  

A Diamond Weekend

Today we spent some time using Knowledgenet to complete an assignment.  We had to visit a website and find out the answers to 3 questions about the Queen's Jubilee and some of the things that have happened in her lifetime.

This is the website we visited.  Click on the picture if you wish to visit it....

 The questions were....
1) Name 3 countries she visited in 1953 on her 'Tour of the Commonwealth'


2) Find out the date of the moon landing in 1969 and find out the name of the first person to walk on the moon.


3) Name the Queen's grandchild who was born in 1977

This afternoon we each made a Maori Koru. We chose warm and cool colours and were careful to repeat the patterns inside the shape.  We think they look pretty neat!

Don't forget that Monday is the Queen's birthday so we all have an extra long weekend.  Mr Miller is going fishing so he will see you all again on Tuesday!