Christmas Fun

These photos are from two special events Kaipara Flats children have been a part of this Christmas season. Ako, the pukeko is sitting in the punga tree on the float in the Warkworth Santa parade and Santa is arriving at the Kaipara Flats Children's Christmas party driven on the quad by Bob.
Here are some Christmas activities, just in case you're looking for some entertainment over the holiday. (There are more activities on the sidebar too.)
Ten Little Snowmen
Reindeer Orchestra
Build Your Own Snowman
Decorate a Gingerbread Man
Santa's Secret Village
Advent Calendar
Snowline

National Jandal Day

Today we are celebrating National Jandal Day. We have dressed up in our beach clothes and jandals and some of us have brought beach toys. We are making gold coin donations for the Surf Life Saving Club at Omaha. Here we all are, dressed up and having fun.

Properties of Plastic and Glass

We have been learning to work together using a programme called Kidspiration to organise our ideas. We were looking at the properties of plastics and glass.
You will notice that some of us used post it notes and card instead of the computer. We could still organise our ideas this way.
We have also been learning to use words like transparent, translucent, opaque, dull and shiny to describe what we see.
If you have trouble reading our work, click on the picture and it will zoom in.

Scatter Cat by Lynley Dodd

We have been learning to use words like in, on, under and behind to describe where things are. Here we have made a voice thread recording our stories about Hairy Maclary chasing all the cats in Scattercat by Lynley Dodd.

What is rubbish?

We spent some time this morning thinking about what rubbish is. Ms Donnell was very impressed with our thinking. Have a look.

Last term we looked in the dictionary to find out what food is.
What does a dictionary say about rubbish?
This came from: http://dictionary.reference.com
worthless, unwanted material that is rejected or thrown out; debris; litter; trash.

Telling Our Own Stories

Is it made from wool?

We have been thinking about...
where we go to find the answer to a question.
Our question was: Is it made from wool?
We looked at the label on our clothes.
We looked in a book called "Wool" by Annabelle Dixon to find out about tests you can do to tell the difference between man-made fibres and wool.
The tests we did were:
The Feeling Test The Pulling Test
The Dampness Test The Ice Cube Test
Tomorrow we plan to go to see an expert, (Monty's dad) to find out about how you get the wool from the sheep. Monty's dad will shear a sheep at the shearing shed while we watch.

Counting in twos

We have been learning to count in twos. We know the twos pattern but we get muddled up when we have pairs to count.
Today we got the pattern tiles and Ms Donnell told us to get all the blues and put them separately in twos.
Jared counted 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, 22

Skittle People for Show Day

This morning in Room 2 we all made skittle people.
The skittle people were made out of plastic bottles and they are for bowling.
First we poured sand in the bottles.
Next some of the children used sandpaper to sand the bottles so the paint would stick to the plastic.
After that we painted the bottles.
Finally we gave them faces and dressed them up and decorated them.
Now we are going to take a photo so everyone can look at our skittle people.

Get Ready for Show Day

Welcome back to school for Term 4. It's time to get ready for Show Day.
Have a listen to this voice thread made by kindergarten children in America. You might get some ideas for your Vegetable Creations.
Click on the picture to go to their class blog.

Shared Lunch (continued)

Here are some more of our graphs.
Please have a look at our food poems on our Writers Blog which use alliteration and rhyme.

Our Shared Lunch

Today we are having a shared lunch.
We have collected information about what people would like for this lunch.
This morning we made bread rolls. We have all the fillings ready to go. Look at our graphs to see the choices we made.

Butterflies and Daffodils

We have been learning to make patterns that show reflections. These butterflies look great flying around the daffodils we made for Daffodil Day.

How do apples grow?

When we thought about what we wanted to know about healthy food at the beginning of this term, a few children asked questions about how fruit grows. Here is a Suzy's World link that has information about this. Suzy's World - apple fact sheet

Type for Gold

This is some fun for practicing your typing and your spelling.

Calendar Pictures

We've been busy working on still life pictures again.
This time we've made pastel drawings of fruit. We were looking at real fruit
on a plate, but we didn't get to eat it.
Instead we were looking at the way the light fell on the fruit. We made the pastel darker where there was shadow and lighter where the light was
shining on the fruit.
These are our calendar pictures that parents can order to buy. They make
good Christmas presents.

Thinking about Cross Country

We used a tool called wallwisher to post our ideas about the big cross country race at Kaipara Flats Sports Club on Tuesday. Ms Donnell asked us to do a PMI (Plus, Minus, Interesting). That means we wrote what was good, what was bad and what was interesting about the day.
If you click on the picture, you will be able to see it bigger to read our sentences.

What happens when you boil an egg?

We have been thinking about what happens to food when you heat it. Here are some of our ideas about how you boil an egg and what happens to an egg when you boil it.

Still Life Drawing

Today in art we did pencil drawings of fruit.
We were learning to look for the dark and light on the fruit. We were learning to look for the shadows.

Pine Cone Pals - reading instructions

The Leopards and Giraffes reading group have been learning to read instructions to make Pine Cone Pals.
David was very organised and brought pine cones and other materials from home so we could make these. Thank you, David.
It was fun and Ms Donnell said she was very impressed with how independent we all were.

Daffodil Day

Here we are wearing yellow on Daffodil Day!

Popcorn Poems

We have all written popcorn poems. We have also made popcorn pictures on Kid Pix. This is what we have to show so far.

Popcorn

Listen to our voice thread to hear our ideas about what makes popcorn pop. We talked about this before we watched a Suzy's World DVD and popped some popcorn ourselves.
We did enjoy eating the popcorn afterwards. Thank you Mrs Parris for lending us your popcorn machine.
We have written explanations of why popcorn pops and now we have read the poems we wrote on this voice thread. We hope you enjoy listening to them.

We love vegetables

Here are our still life vegetable pictures.
We looked at the work of other artists.
We looked at photos of vegetables. We noticed that some of the vegetables were partly hidden behind other vegetables.
Some of the vegetables had been cut so you could see inside.
We used pastels and created our own pictures.
Some of us used pastels in different ways to create different effects.
We hope you enjoy looking at them.

Bad Jelly the Witch - our teacher for a day

On Friday we all dressed up as a book character and it was fun. We had Bad Jelly for our teacher and Mrs Todd read to us. I hope Bad Jelly doesn't come back. by Tom

Storytelling online

I just have to show you this website, especially as it is LIBRARY WEEK.
It has wonderful stories read by actors.
It also has one of my favourite books from last year, "Guji Guji" by Chih-Yuan Chen.
Please try it out.
Click on the picture to go to the website.

Our Healthy Breakfast

Today Room 2 had a morning of a healthy breakfast. We all had a great morning. Do you know what we had? We had weet-bix and porridge and a little bit of brown sugar. by Tenaija
We also could have stewed apple or peaches and we could put a little sprinkle of cinnamon on the top if we wanted.
The last picture is our brainstorm of ideas for words to describe the taste of the food we ate today. Ms Donnell recorded for us using the mimio.
We have each made our own menu recording our ideas for a healthy breakfast.

The Food Pyramid

Today we learnt about different food groups using this food pyramid interactive site.
Connor's question last week was: Why do you need to eat healthy food. We found some answers here.
Click on the picture to go to this site.
The link to the Breakfast Detective game is on the side bar.

More food! (Art today & eating)

Today Ms Donnell brought lots of fruit to school.
First we used it to to look at and draw.
After play we got to eat it.
Yum! Yum!

What is food? Part 2

Today we looked in our class dictionaries to find the word food. This is what it said:
food
anything that you eat to keep you alive and to help you grow
Does this answer our question? Do we understand the answer?
Yes it does. The dictionary was a good place for us to look to find the answer to this question.