Saturday, July 28, 2012

More Measurement

We are continuing to learn different ways to measure things.  Today we used 1 centimetre cubes to measure our hand-spans.  We remembered last week's key points.  
  • Use the same unit
  • Start at the start
  • Place the units end to end
Because we were using 1 centimetre  cubes, we now know how many centimetres our hands are from the tip of our little finger to the tip of our thumb, in a straight line. 




We discovered that 1 centimetre is about the same width as a finger so we went around the room trying to spot things that were close to 1 centimetre, then checking with our fingers.








I am really enjoying being back in Room 4 on Fridays.  See you next week. 
Mrs B : )

Sunday, July 22, 2012

Room 4 Measures Up!

I was awfully pleased to be back with the darling kids in Room 4 too.  Yay!

We had a lot of fun measuring teddy bears and many other friends, including a pony, tiger and even a giant ladybug!  There were big bears, little bears, fat bears, skinny bears, bears that stood up tall and bears that crawled.

We put the bears into different categories to start with.  Tall bears, medium height bears and short bears.  In small groups we ordered the bears according to different attributes such as height, arm length and nose size. 

Dakota's ladybug is much taller than Josh's policeman bear and Caitlin's crawling bear when they are like this.

But Josh was keen to point out that Policeman bear was taller when ladybug was standing like this.


Then we drew outlines of our bears onto paper and measured them using cubes.  

Thomas's bear was nearly 7 cubes wide.


Some bears were quite short but some were much, much taller.  Check out Kerrianne's bear.

Snowy was rather tall.  How many cubes do you think she used?

We learned THREE very IMPORTANT things about measuring.  

  1. You must use the same unit for the whole measurement.  This means you can't start measuring how tall your teddy is with cubes then suddenly use a pencil as well.
  2. You need to start at the start.  Don't have the unit hanging over the end of the object you are trying measure!
  3. You need to put the units end to end.  No gaps! 
We put our measurement knowledge to good use and measured some of us.  We decided that using cubes to measure ourselves would take ages so we used orange rods instead.  You can check out the full size outline of Luke in the stairwell to see just how many rods tall he is.  You'll find some photos of others with their outlines too.

Have a great week Room 4 - I'll see you on Friday
: )    Mrs B

Thursday, July 19, 2012

First week back!

We have had such a great week!  I am so pleased to be back with the darling kids in Room 4!  We have spent quite a bit of time getting used to routines and new activities (well Ms Little has mostly!!)

My favourite thing about this week was using our poem of the week to practice our volume, pace and expression.  We are currently learning poems to recite in Week 5 and Poem of the week is a great way to practice our skills together.

What do you think of our skills?? And our frogs???


Monday, July 16, 2012

Monday, July 2, 2012

TTFN

Winnie the Pooh's good friend, Tigger,  is (slightly) famous for saying TTFN.  
(Ta Ta For Now)

There were some fabulously great times this last week and a few sad ones as well.  Week ten was Mrs B's last week teaching Room 4, (sad) but we got to meet Ms Little who is Room 4's resident teacher (exciting).  

We had a fun last week in Room 4.  Katrin McMullan told us many interesting stories of the legend of Matariki.  We really loved the story about the Star Fishes.



The little star fishes didn't listen to their parent's good advice and got caught in the net.  A bit of a lesson for all of us really!!

In Room 4, we enjoyed reading the ANZAC Biscuit Man again and had a load of fun with ANZAC biscuit related learning.  We did some drama and put ourselves in the place of the ANZAC Biscuit Man.  We tried to imagine what he might have been thinking as he ran away from the old man, old woman, horse and cow. We came up with some interesting thoughts.  Especially when we wondered what he thought as he realised he HADN'T thought when he leaped on the kunekune pig's back!!

We did some dramatic warm ups before getting started on our thoughts.  In this photo we are passing an imaginary feather around the circle.


Lindsay is holding the feather carefully between her finger and thumb and Koby is watching carefully so he can take it without dropping it.

 We used stencils and the painting technique 'scumbling' to paint our ANZAC Biscuit Men on Wednesday.








We mixed our own shades of brown using dark brown, white and yellow and had to use teamwork to make sure our stencils stayed in place while we 'scumbled'.

On Thursday we painted the Jaffa eyes, Hokey Pokey buttons and a mouth on them.  They are now in Room 4 with our speech bubbles so pop in and take a look sometime.


We also made some real ANZAC biscuits. (A very big thank you to Leanne, the Teacher Aide of the year.) Yummy!


So this is the TTFN bit from Mrs B

Room 4 - you have been a fabulous class and I'm sure you will continue to be a fabulous class for the fabulous Ms Little.  I've got many great memories of your smiley faces and I am very proud of how you have thought hard, worked hard and made great progress.  I'll miss you heaps but this is not haere ra, (goodbye, I'm off) but ka kite ano (see you again)


Ka kite ano!!!


Mrs B 
xxx