Our Yellow Tail Fish

Fish Scale

Today we had a close look at a yellow tail fish using a digital microscope. We checked it out to see if it had all the things a fish has to have to be a fish. Gills? Yes. Fins? Yes. A backbone? Yes, as far as we could tell from the outside. Scales? (most fish have these, but not all) Yes.
The movie showing here is of one of the scales.

Thinking about fish

We haven't decided on our big question about ocean life yet. At the moment, we are just reading and thinking about what we know. Here is some of our writing about fish.
It's straight out of our books.
The first two are by Toby, Nathan S and Grifin. Some of the word fish got missed when I scanned Nathan's writing. See if you can work out where "fish" goes in the sentence.
I'll put more on later.
Here is Len's from the computer:
The water goes in the fish’s mouth and then it comes out of their gills. That is how they breeth.
Fish sleep with their eies opin . a fish has a fin. a fish has scales.

Sea Creature Alphabet

At Kaipara Flats School we are learning about the Habits of Mind that set us up to be successful people.
The Habit of Mind we are learning about at the moment is to think flexibly.
One way you can be a flexible thinker is to work hard to come up with lots of ideas and that is what we tried to do when we brainstormed sea creatures to make this sea creatures alphabet chart.
We have also created our own alphabet charts. You may see some of these later.

Mayor Penny's Reading Challenge

Welcome back everyone.
This is our first blog post for Term 2.
We have been very busy and have lots of things to blog about but today Ms Donnell wants to tell everyone that she is taking up the Mayor's challenge.
She is going to read to Room 2 for half an hour a day for every school day in the month of May. She started on Friday and is looking forward to having an excuse to read lots of books. She is going to try to find books that relate to our topic: Ocean Life.

Floating and Sinking

BubbleShare: Share photos - Easy Photo Sharing

We have been learning to draw and paint portraits. We have done pencil and charcoal sketches and now these are our paintings of our talking buddies. At the moment, we are also working on self-portraits in collage.

Logan's retelling of "The Lazy Bear"

Remember our voice thread about "The Lazy Bear"?
Well, Logan started writing about this story a couple of weeks ago and, even though we have been doing lots of other writing, he has been very persistent and kept working on this one, because he wanted to retell the whole story.
This is very special work. Please read and enjoy.
It will help you understand the voice thread better too.
There is a story named The Lazy Bear.
The bear had lots of friends because he was kind and thoughtful.
On the hill, the bear found a cart left there by the wood cutter.
He went down the hill lots of times.
He had to push up the hill lots of times.
Then he had a plan.
He invited the deer, the goat and the raccoon to the ride. When they got to the ride they went down the hill. When they got to the bottom, they all got out except the bear.
From one to a hundred times he was still in the cart.
On the hundredth time his friends had a plan.
On the hundredth time his friends pushed the bear down over the other side of the hill.
Bad news.
Everyone laughed and stared at him.
Good news.
The animals set the cart up on the hill.
Then he had to bother pushing his friends up the hill.
Not just one time.
But hundreds of times.
And he will never do that again.
Logan

Last week we talked about what it means to be a positive person and what kinds of things you might say if you are being positive. We all like getting compliments so we practiced giving compliments to each other. Here are some ideas we had.
Well done, Phoenix. You summed up for us how people can be positive or negative.

The Lazy Bear - more about friendship