Music Mania!

 During terms 2 and 3, our whole school had the opportunity to learn singing and drumming techniques with professional musician Marie Dobson. There was a lot of learning and a lot of fun. We learned vocal warm-up techniques and how to project our voices from behind our 'frame'. We played around with African drum beats and learned our very own class beat. 

The hardest thing? Keeping to the beat, without speeding up or slowing down - both in the singing and the drumming. The thing we improved in the most? Keeping to the beat!

We planned to share our learning with whānau and friends by holding a musical showcase. Alert Level 2 changed those plans, so we now present to you a video of our learning. You'll be able to tell that many of us felt a bit uncomfortable in front of the camera, which shows in different ways.

We hope you enjoy watching!

Week 7: Maths and Writing Monday and Tuesday

 Hi all! Lots of fun in here, let me know what you get up to! Hope to see you all at out Meet today at 10:45 - see the link on the class site.

Take care, really hope to see you all soon, from Whaea Tiff.

Writing and Maths until next week!

 Kia ora team, I think the report writing might be a little tricky to do at home. So, today I bring you some fun easy writing ideas, and some extra maths as well as continuing with yesterday's maths.

(If you have any trouble viewing or printing these slides in this blog, you can also find them in our Learning Site, filed under Maths or Writing).

Writing

Hi team. I am working on our writing for today, but have had a few things come up, so check back after 11am for the next step in report writing. Plenty of maths to go on in the meantime! Cheers, Whaea Tiff.

12 noon update: Okay, I have added some videos to take you to the next step of writing your report! It's a whole lot of new learning and fun. See the Report Writing post from Monday.

If you want something more straightforward, I'd love to know some of the activities you've been doing during lockdown, why not write me a short letter telling me about your time at home?

Cheers all

Whaea Tiff.

Pāngarau Maths: Basic but not easy??

 Morena e te tamariki ataahua! Morning beautiful children! So I thought that Learning at Home time is a great time to get nice and solid with our basic facts. By the end of Year 3, we want to be able to easily remember addition and subtraction facts up to 20. This makes maths way easier as we get older.

So, here is some practise.

I had imagined tamariki would write the questions and answers out on paper. However, if you have access to a printer and would like to print, please find the slideshow here.

Maths from nzmaths.com

Today I am keen to explore some Learning At Home sheets from nzmaths. If you like these, I can make some more that are similar. I'm also interested to know how fast you finish the sheets - ten minutes? Thirty? Is it more than one day's worth of maths? I think it looks like about 2 days, but am not sure. So let me know your thoughts in the comments below!

Here is the Learning at Home sheet for Year 2 students

Here is the Learning at Home sheet for Year 3 students

And if you want an easier (year 1) or harder challenge, just look here.

Exploring Report Writing.

Good morning team! I know many of you are super keen to get into your animal reports, so this week we are going to get back into our report writing. This is the slide show for the week, I will add to it each day. 

I hope you enjoy that sunny day out there! From Whaea Tiff.

Making Daffs for Daffodil Day!

Today is the NZ Cancer Society's Daffodil Day. Supporting Daffodil Day is really important, because it raises money for the Cancer Society. This is an organisation that does amazing work helping people and families who are affected by cancer. 

Usually they hold a street appeal - you might remember buying little yellow plastic daffodils to pin onto your T-shirt? But because of Alert Level 4, the Cancer Society can't hold the street appeal. But we can still help! Here is how:

• Make Daffs! I am about to have a go with my tamariki once I have posted this.  I have tried to find the easiest tutorial I could. Don't worry if you don't have yellow and green paper - we don't either, but we are going to use crayons to colour our paper before we cut and fold it.
• Take Photos! We want photos of YOU with daffodils you have made, drawn, or maybe you are lucky enough to have daffodils in your garden. Whaea Loren at the office is putting all the photos onto our school Facebook page, to paint our page yellow and show our support! (Email photos to me or to Loren - tiff@hokitika.school.nz or office@hokitika.school.nz, or send them via our school Facebook page).
• Donate Money! You can talk to your adults about donating money. It's okay if they don't want to, you can still show support by making daffs. We have a school donation page where all the money raised will go to the Cancer Society. Find it here.

Galactic Olympics!!!

Seriously, it's waaay too exciting. The Astronauts on the ISS just held their very own micro-gravity Olympics! And so, of course, we are going to watch the video, and then please do at least ONE of the challenges each day, for the next three days.

Before I forget, our flock of mathemachickens is growing nicely. I added a different 'How to Draw a Chicken' tutorial, because I thought that first one was really hard! Have a look at yesterday's post to see the new tutorial and everyone's funky chickens.

But now, settle down to watch the Space Olympics!! Wooohooo!

A flock of Mathemachickens!

Tuesday - Maths-tastic!

Good morning lovely people! I have had a lot of fun finding some maths to make you THINK, and to encourage you to discuss ideas with your whānau.

Also today a challenge for you all - I think we need a picture of a MATHEMACHICKEN for our class - would you like to have a go at drawing one? I am going to have a go. There's a how-to-draw on the first slide, but it looks tricky. It's a chicken in pants, just what we need!

Enjoy your day of learning and fun with your whānau, from Whaea Tiff.

Learning at Home: Writing!

 Hi Team Piwakawaka! As well as a maths challenge (in the post below), I also have a writing challenge for you. This writing challenge is for today AND tomorrow, so take your time! You can email me your work and I'll share it right here on this post. I hope you have a LOT of fun with this! (If you don't have a dice, just choose 3 numbers between 1 and 6, or even better, ask 3 people in your whānau to choose a number between 3 and 6). 

Learning at Home: Maths!

Kia ora Piwakawaka people! How has you weekend been? I've really enjoyed spending time with my kids, we had a mega lego day today and I made a Ninjago dragon that has been broken for ages. Very satisfying. Anyway, I have made some maths challenges for you to do on Monday. These are all about thinking in FIVES. Let me know how you go in the comments below! From Whaea Tiff.

We have touchdown...

Last week we reluctantly concluded our GIVE ME SOME SPACE unit. We finished by discovering 'the Astronaut in Me' - yep, amazingly we discovered that the attributes which make a good member of our classroom also are the attributes which make a good space engineer! 

Over these 4 weeks we have learned about the International Space Station, but also about so much more - the earth's atmosphere, the planets in our solar system, the sun, asteroids... the list goes on. We watched amazing videos, we learned how to take notes, we imagined ourselves as astronauts, and took Space-selfies. We spoke to a real live Space Engineer. We measured, we imagined, and we created a scale replica of a Sleep Station! Scroll down to see other posts showing all this learning. We hope you have enjoyed these blog posts, and the Space Booklets that the tamariki proudly took home last Thursday. We have had a blast with this learning.

Piwakawaka and the Peacock.

It sounds like some strange fairy tale, doesn't it? But it's definitely non-fiction. 

Last Tuesday the tamariki of Space Module Piwakawaka (that's Rūma Piwakawaka in earthling language) had a virtual meeting with a real live Space Engineer, Lisa Peacocke. Lisa has been working on the Mars Missions, and has a huge wealth of space knowledge, some of which she shared with us. We were all pretty excited about meeting with Lisa, and I am the first to admit that I did not leave people a 5-second pause to respond to questions...sorry. We're all learning! The tamariki took the opportunity to ask some BIG questions. 

Behold, the recording of our meeting with Space Engineer Lisa Peacocke. (If you can't quite hear the tamariki speaking in the video, don't worry, Lisa was able to hear, and she repeats the question as she answers it).

Moon, Mars, and Microgravity.

Yesterday we learned about all the different layers of earth's atmosphere. The I.S.S. is in the THERMOSPHERE, about 440 km away from us. Here is some of our maths about that - the 4 tamariki are standing on the edge of the EXOSPHERE, which is much thicker than all the other layers of our atmosphere.

Today we had a quick look at how far it is from Earth to the moon and Mars. They are MUCH further away than the ISS. The moon is over 400,000 km away from us, and Mars is 67 MILLION km away! 

This means that, travelling by rocket, it takes about 2 days to get from Earth to the ISS, about 3 days to reach the moon - and 6 - 7 months to reach Mars! There is SO much exciting learning to be done about Mars... but we are going to stick with our ISS learning. If you want to learn more about Mars with your tamariki, this is a great place to start: NASA Mars for Kids

Finally, we bamboozled ourselves by starting to learn about microgravity. Watch this video and see how much information you can 'catch' - it sure is a curious concept!

Astronauts of the Galaxy!!

 We are learning about space. We found a cool app that lets us become astronauts and choose a star cluster as the background. We can also find out about the star clusters through the app. The names are really cool - for example Cat's Paw Nebula and Coyote Head Nebula. We haven't take photos of everyone yet. We will try to take more every day.

How they eat, drink and live on the International Space Station

 We had a very interesting Friday morning learning about how astronauts eat, drink and live on the International Space Station. We are learning to 'catch' the information we hear and then to write it down in note form. This can be hard when there are lots of new words and we sometimes get distracted when we start giggling about toilets in space... Here is the video we've been watching, we'd love to watch it again with our whānau at home.

Maths and Writing with Whaea Tiff is out of this world!

 Literally... for the first 4 weeks of school we are going to be learning all about the International Space Station. This will involve maths and writing, and a whole lot uf fun. On Wednesday morning of week 3, we will listen as an astronaut on the ISS reads a book to us, LIVE on air! Here is the plan for our learning, be sure to check back on this blog to share our discoveries.

Here is our timetable for Term 1.

This is the timetable we follow most days, for most of the day. Of course, there will be many times when we don't follow this timetable because of other events, or special opportunities that we choose to join. Some of the subjects on the timetable have not yet begun, the first few weeks of term one are often a bit irregular.

Welcome to 2021