We were very lucky to have Sean O’conor from Ngati Porou visit our kura this week to share some waiata whakatauki with us. We learnt the meaning behind all the kupu in the waiata and then sang together as a whole akomanga, while some lucky volunteers got to play the ukulele and xylophone for us. He reka hoki te waiata a ngā tamariki! Click the link to hear some sweet tunes. IMG_3185
This week our tautoru me tauwhā were given to opportunity to lean some line dancing with the tauwhā from Tāne Mahuta. Whaea Fi taught us a whole routine, then we practiced the routine to different waiata at various speeds. Our favourite moves were the k step and the grape vine. We are very excited about our next lesson.
Ngā mihi nunui ki a koe Whaea Fi!
Here is a throwback to when we did active travel at school. Our ākonga learnt about the give way rules and got to practise putting these into action on our pump track. Some akonga were in cardboard cars, some were on scooters, bikes and we had pedestrians using the pedestrian crossing. We also revisited the stop, look and listen rule for crossing roads safely on the way to and from school. He rawe tau mahi koutou!
Tautoru me tauwhā have been learning about procedural text. We wrote out the process for making fairy bread and home made up and go.
We then had to follow our process to make them. This was a super fun way to test out our sequence and to check that we are using the correct precise actions words.
Check out some of our creations.
We have continued learning about changes of state this week through an ice block experiment. Our ākonga have had fun describing the changes of state from the powder at the start which was a solid, to the liquid form once we added water and dissolved the powder, we then froze the ice blocks which turned them back into solid, and last but definitely not least, the ice blocks were turned back into liquid once we ate them!
This week we had our first round of science experiments to spark interest in the awesome concepts that we will be diving into this term. Here we have some rōpū who were watching how things can change states from a solid to a liquid. We did this using bath bombs as our mystery item which tamariki enjoyed watching dissolve, bubble and fizz into a liquid state. Our ākonga then came up with questions about why that happened. They then got to make the next batch of bath bombs to get an idea of what goes into them and how water can activate the change. Watch this space for more fun experiments to come!
Today our teina participated in the junior TRY-athlon. They did such an amazing job, giving it all and really showing mana when waiting for their race.
It was great to see all of their hard work from practice really pay off.
Ngā mihinui ki a koutou katoa i haere mai ki te tautoko i te rā whakanui o te Kirihimete. Thank you to everyone who came along to support us during the Christmas parade, we really appreciate everyone who gave up time on their Saturday to come along. We sang our waiata to a huge crowd of people and the kids did a fantastic job. Tau kē!
During mindfulness with Erica this year we have covered a range of very useful mindfulness tools to help keep us calm and focussed in class. During our last session Erica talked about the survival brain which is centred in reacting quickly when we feel scared, threatened or upset. We then talked about times that we all might have gone into our survival brain and how we can come out of this mode in order to be calm and active learners in class. Erica then talked about our pre-frontal cortex or our calm brain and how it is responsible for higher level thinking like learning, planning and making good decisions. We used mirimiri or massage to bring us into a calm state, and we then looked at mindful eating and paying attention to the smells, sounds, texture and taste of our food. Thank you for an awesome year of mindfulness Erica!
