OLD SCHOOL DAYS AND WAYS

One of last terms highlights was the visit from Isaac’s Nan Sargent.  She came to talk to us about ‘school in her day’.  Nan Sargent is 85 years old and she went to school in Lavooka, a small rocky island in Fiji. 

We were learning from the past – How and why do things change?  We were also learning about Relating to Others – in particular using our manners.  We had to be sure to say, ‘please’, ‘thank you’, and ‘excuse me’.  We had to listen carefully, know when to speak and when to listen, and we had to wait our turn. 

We learnt a lot about school in the past and what we learnt helped us to reach a decision. 

Devon decided that he’d rather be a student now.  Here is his persuasive argument.

School Days

I would definitely rather go to school now than in the 1930s, because corporal punishment was allowed back then.  You’d even get punished for getting an answer wrong.  Because of that I would have been afraid of the teacher and to put my hand up even if I thought I had the right answer.  I also think no one should be physically punished for getting an answer wrong. 

Now we have computers that make learning easier and we can go onto learning websites that make us want to learn.  It also means that we can publish our writing. 

Now teachers give us credit for what we do well.  In the past they punished us if our best wasn’t good enough.  It’s so much more fun and fair now and that’s why I would rather go to school in the present. 

Devon used the ‘What If’ thinker’s key to plan his writing.  He also used a PMI chart to note ‘plus, minus and interesting’ things about school in the past.   

ANIMATIONS

Last term we decided to get clever with ICT and we started creating our first animations. 

To help us understand about 'relating to others' we decided to read some of Aesop's Fables. 

Danielle, Ffion and Jorja created this animation for 'The Ant and the Chrysalis'.  They chose PowerPoint as their presentation method and unfortunately I am having trouble with adding to our blog.  However, it's too good not to share, so just flick through the pages and hopefully you'll get the idea. 

Make sure you keep watching, because we'll be making more animations soon and we'll be sure to use MovieMaker rather than PowerPoint as our presentation method.

Here is their story - 

Kuyper the Ant

One day Kuyper the ant was scurrying about in search of food.  Up above he saw something hanging from the leaf of a tree.  Kuyper did not know it was a chrysalis.  "Oh!  Your poor thing," exclaimed Kuyper.  "What a sad fate you have.  I have run anywhere I wish.  I can even climb mountains."  A few days later Kuyper came back that way again hoping to find more food.  Suddenly a cloud seemed to come over him and he felt a soft breeze.  What did he see this time?  One of the most beautiful butterflies he had ever seen.  His most pitied friend flew off in the breeze. 

The Ant and Chrysalis

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KEY COMPETENCIES

RELATING TO OTHERS

We are learning to be kind and caring.

What random acts of kindness can you indulge in during the holidays?

Why not start today - practice makes perfect!

Create a calendar and diary random acts that will display your kind and caring character traits to others. 


Leave a comment, sharing how others have shown random acts of kindness.

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!