THUNDERSTORMS

WEATHER WIZ KIDS is another great site that's helping us to answer our questions about weather.

Room 4 students think they know this about weather - 'thunder comes before lightning and clouds crashing together make thunder'.

Mrs Hunter has used Weather Wiz Kids as the main website to help her write an explanation about 'Thunderstorms'.

She hopes it helps you to understand how they work. Your job is to now draw a diagram the aids this explanation.

Thunderstorms

Wild weather of thunder and lightning, gusty winds and heavy rain is called a thunderstorm. Cumulonimbus clouds cause thunderstorms, but not by crashing together - crashing clouds are not the cause of thunderstorms.

Have you ever noticed that you see a flicker of lightning before you hear the sound of thunder? Lightning travels all the way from the cumulonimbus cloud to the ground and as it does a channel of air is formed. As the lightning bolt leaves the channel the air collapses back and a sound wave is created – that’s thunder.

What causes the lightning then? Frozen raindrops dance around inside the cumulonimbus cloud and as they bump into each other they create an electrical charge. Soon the cloud is full of electrical charges and when the charge gets too strong, lightning strikes.  The thunder and lightning actually happen at the same time, but the sound of thunder is slower than the speed of light.

Did you know that lightning kills and injures more people a year than hurricanes and tornadoes. If the thunder and lightning seem to happen at the same time, then the lightning is very close to you, and dangerous. Check out the weather forecast by visiting http://www.metservice.com/national/index to ensure you don’t caught out in that wet and wild, crazy weather of winter.

Check out Arizona's diagram below -

Good job Arizona. 

WEATHER

We're learning about 'WEATHER'. 

There are four seasons.  Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter and each season has distinguising features, such as: the height of the sun in the sky, day length, daily and nightly temperatures. 

Watch this video - it explains 'What Causes the Seasons?' 



We are writing explanations about what causes seasons and we are using a diagram as a visual aid to help.

Read more about New Zealand's climate, weather, temperatures and seasons here - NEW ZEALAND TOURISM GUIDE

TREE HOUSE WEATHER KIDS provides basic information on weather topics such as winds, moisture, air pressure, seasons and storms.

We are also writing and recording our own weather reports.  Tamati Coffey is a roving weather reporter and we watched this short video clip to help us with writing our own report.

GARDEN BARREL

We've got a garden barrel outside our classroom and we can't wait till the plants start to flower.

Ffion, TeRangi and Arizona helped Mrs to plant it and Ffion has made a PhotoStory to explain the process of 'Barrel Planting'.

RED NOSE DAY

MATHS

We have started learning about 'Statistics'.

We started by collecting some data. We had to think of a question to ask our classmates, something we wanted to find out. We had to give them choices for their answers and we had to have an 'other' section incase they didn't like the available choices.

We recorded our data with tally charts. Tally charts make counting easy, because you skip count in fives.

Jack is in year 3. He wanted to know what kind of movies we all liked best and he gave us 5 choices. He then put his data into a 'chart maker' at mathswarehouse.com .

Here is his finished graph, it is a bar graph:

What questions can be answered from the information provided on the graph?

Which movie type collected the most votes? (LW)
Which movie type is the least liked? (VS)
Which movie type is the second favourite? (SW)
Which movie type is the second least liked? (NL)
Which movie type did six people in our class like? (FM)
How many people in total were surveyed? (JW)
How many people liked horror movies? (JA)
Did we all like the choices provided? (JH)
How many more people liked horror movies than action movies? (TM)
How many people didn't choose horror as their favourite movie? (JG)

We started with the easy questions first and then we found out there were so many more questions we could answer. We used many maths strategies to answer the questions and our most favourite way to solve maths problems is by making 'tidy ty' numbers.

Lydia is another year 3 student who visits us for maths. Here is her finished graph, it is a pie graph:

What questions can be answered from this graph and what are the answers? Leave your comments!

MANAGING SELF

We have been reflecting on our managing self goals.

Catherine, Destiny, Jordan, Devon, Sophie, De'Quante, Ffion and Ashley

Our goal was to make sure our desks were always tidy.  It is much easier to find what we need, when we need it, if our desk is tidy!

How did we do?

Someone has a very tidy desk, but where are their tools for school? 

Desks

RHYTHM INTERACTIVE

Last week Rhythm Interactive visited Halcombe School. 

We have been writing about the show.  We had to work hard to make our writing interesting. 

This was our success criteria:

• no waffling (say our sentence in our head before we write)
• share honest feelings
• use onomatopoeia and one other language feature
• use interesting words (we have banned words - went, cool, said)
• Try to use new beginnings for sentences (don't start all of your sentences with I, We, He, She) 
• Use WOW words

We think we've written some fabulous stories.  Here is Daniel's story and we will publish more.  We're also creating some movies and picture collages, so keep watching and reading.

Anton never talked throughout the show until the end.  He pulled the funniest faces.  He had googly eyes and he looked like a cross eyed cat.  My hands were as red as strawberries.  Anton made awesome sounds on his drums.  BOOM – BOOM – BANG - BANG.  I got bored, so I played around on it.  Anton told us to dance while the others played their drums.  I really wanted to do the moon walk.  The thing I liked about the drums is that they can make different sounds.  I tried to do the same sounds as Anton.  It was hard at first, but eventually it got easier and easier.  That’s when he talked for the first time.  The first thing that came out of this mouth was, “Good Morning!”  We all bellowed back, “Good Morning!”  He introduced Lucy his helping hand and then we got into it one last time. 

By Daniel.