Room 8 Class of 2015

Thank you too all the parents and caregivers who came along to the final year 2/3 assembly. The children loved showing off their singing skills. I have added our slide show below for those who wish to check it out again or show family members. It's been a wonderful year teaching Room 8. I am so proud of the children. Have a wonderful Christmas and a fun, relaxing break. See you in 2016!

Dance

Movement and Dance

Room 8 is exploring the elements of movement and dance. Firstly the children explored moving their bodies through different levels. Here they are moving up high, down low and stretching wide. This was an opportunity for the children to explore how they can make different shapes with their bodies.

Next the children got into small groups. They walked around the classroom and when I said freeze they ran back to their group to make a shape. This is where we related dance and movement back to our provocation of bees. The children made a range of objects and shapes with their group including a bee hive, flowers and a honey comb cell. I was impressed with how well the children worked together. They also explored using different levels and came up with diverse, creative ideas. 

The next step for the children is to begin putting a sequence of shapes and movements together. They would like to do this to music. 

Colour Workshop With Neil

For those of you who don't know Neil, he volunteers for the Salvation Army and regularly helps out at Bromley School. You will find him in Room 8 most Thursday mornings. Neil is also a talented artist.

When Neil offered to take a colour workshop with Room 8 I thought it would be a great idea. Many of the children love art and it was a fantastic opportunity to learn some technical skills. 

Neil guided the children through an interactive colour workshop where they learned about primary colours and how to mix them to make secondary colours. He also taught them how to create art using complimentary colours.

The children also enjoyed learning how to create contrast and shade. A huge thank you to Neil, the children loved it. 

Bee Provocation

It all began when the children took a keen interest in bees during our environment and sustainability provocation.

At the beginning of the term I asked the children to create a painting that showed me what they wanted to learn about this term. They must have still had bees on their mind as many bee paintings appeared.

Next the children observed some images of bees through a magnifying glass. They wrote down things they thought, saw and wondered.

Many wonderings were "How do bees make honey?" To investigate this we watched some video clips on youtube.

To remember what the process was the children also looked in books and I thought it would be fun to role play each step. The children chose whether they wanted to be worker bees, flowers, house bees or honey-comb cells. They had a great time acting out how bees make honey. The children are also writing explanations on how bees make honey. Be sure to come in and check them out.

Keeping Bromley Beautiful

As part of Keeping NZ Beautiful week and our class provocation, we volunteered to clean up Bromley School and Bromley Community.

We joined forces with Rooms 9, 11 and 6 to collect as much litter as we could find around the school. Next we ventured out onto Keighleys road and into Cypress Gardens.

We had a great time in the sunshine helping out and working together.

A big thank you to Wayne Lester for helping us out.

Be Connected

One of our Bromley School values it to be connected. This is all about building relationships with others, knowing that you belong and participating.

Last week the children were given a task that involved connecting with someone they don't usually work with. The task was to create a small art work that shows what it means to be connected. Each child chose a specific role in the creation process. To finish off their collaborative art work the child wrote a short caption describing what their art work was showing.

Every step involved working together and problem solving together. The children really enjoyed the task and I was blown away with the detail in the final pieces of art. What do you think? Come in and have a look.

Cross Country Fun Run

Today the children participated in the school Cross Country Fun Run. It was fantastic to see them enjoying the experience. Many of the children told me that they felt proud of themselves after completing the race as it was their first year doing two laps. We have been jogging most days for fitness and learning about the importance of exercise. I also thought it was great to get outside in the sunshine, use our courageous school value and support our Hapu groups. Ka pai Room 8!

The Rubbish Problem

As part of our provocation, today we went for a walk around our school environment. We noticed there was a lot rubbish lying around even though we have rubbish bins in the school. This made us feel disappointed because it isn’t good for our school environment.

Miss  Banks asked us, “how can this problem be solved?”

Here are some of our ideas...

Carlos – We could do what they did in “Lost” (our big book) and make posters.

Willow – If we see rubbish, pick it up.

Eli – If you throw rubbish anywhere, you should pick it up.

Rylie – Stop, think and put it in the rubbish.

Ashton – If you see people throw it on the ground, you go pick it up.

Seth – If you see any rubbish around pick it up.

Mackenzie – If you see anyone chuck rubbish on the ground you could run to them as fast as your can and tell them to pick it up and put it in the bin.

Lukas RW – Don’t bring rubbish or food out to the playground, otherwise that’s how it will be lying around.

Korbin – Don’t bring any  food outside then worms come.

Mana – Make our school have rubbish bins in each corner so if you’re playing in the corner you wouldn’t be bothered to go all the way from the corner.

Carlos – We could make some fake dollars and whoever picks up a piece of rubbish gets a fake dollar.

Lilly – Make a sign, do not leave your rubbish around.

Lucas N – Make Ariki the rubbish police so if someone tells them they put rubbish on the ground they might get a reflection.

Marc – Could make this big as hoover thing and hoover thing and hoover all the rubbish up.

Ashton – If they don’t put their rubbish in the bin this class before they go, they can stay in.

Kaylee – This thing kinda relates to Carlos’ one. If you pick up rubbish you could get money. Then Friday you could go to the shop and spend your money.

Marc – We could get like this gun and you could hoover stuff up and if they see rubbish you could just pick it up with that.

Korbin – We could have some people that go outside and they have like this hoover and a shovel and then if they see someone drop rubbish they could hoover it up and put it in the rubbish.

Mana – Make some signs saying please be a tidy kiwi by not throwing your rubbish on the ground and by putting it in the bins.

Lucas RW – Put rubbish bins where they usually throw the rubbish.

Rylie – I think I know what caused this…I thin that everyone filled up the bins and rubbish comes flying out of the bins.

Lucas N – We could make like little robots that when they see rubbish they like turn into one of those robot vacuum cleaners and they pick it up then they go to the office and they press a little button which makes a little hole appear and they just drop it down there.

Carlos – You need some wood for this one. Make a rubbish maze and if you find a rubbish bin in the hall, that’s when you have won and you put it in the bin.

Ryder – Inspire other people not to throw rubbish on the ground and inspire them to care for everyone environment.

Tasks

Every week the children in Room 8 get given different independent tasks to complete. Here's what they did this week...

We followed the instructions from last weeks big book and made a Pom-pom.

We created our own COURAGEOUS characters. These are going to help us with our writing next week.

We replaced the boring verbs in these sentences with exciting verbs.

We used the Explain Everything app on the ipad to show what a verb is and how to use it in writing to make the writing more detailed. 

We tried out visuwords.com. We put in new words we had discovered in our reading books. It made a web of other words like that word.