Winners!!!!

Room 3 took a fun photo of themselves celebrating our use of Banqer this year, which is an online financial literacy resource. As well as having our own online bank accounts, we've used the resource to design and build our own malls on Minecraft. We entered the photo in to a competition and today we found out we won one of the prizes. Go Room 3. We can't wait to see what we will get in our Banqer Auction prize pack. Here's our winning photos.

Edisons

For inquiry this term we have been discovering how robots work. We have been programming the Edison robots to do all sorts of cool things like driving forwards and backwards, turning, and avoiding obstacles. Yesterday we built mazes and then programmed Edison to avoid obstacles. We had to see if he could get to the end of our maze without getting stuck. There were some very imaginative mazes built out of everything from glue sticks to books and it was great to see each group testing their maze and making changes where needed.

Drama Time

Room 3 and 4 have been doing drama together every second week. We play lots of fun warm-up games that help us practice movement, facial expressions and body language. Last week we worked in groups to create an advert for a piece of classroom equipment. It was hilarious watching everyone's 'adverts'. The most persuasive group were Aidan, Oliver, Cohen and Finn who's pencil case could be all sorts of amazing things!

STEAM Activities

This term Room 3 are going to be completing STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art and maths) challenges. Our first challenge was to create a catapult that would propel a marshmallow across the room. It was great to see groups making changes to their catapults in between rounds to make their catapult work better! Our second challenge was to make a waterslide out of cardboard and a range of other materials. The rules were it couldn't leak, had to had a tower of 25cm high, a ladder and the slide couldn't drop straight down. Two teams were successful!! 

Growing Patterns

Today we looked at all the different ways this pattern grows. We came up with lots of different ways. Troy built figure 10 for us out of blocks and we found out it had 55 squares! Isabelle noticed that each figured added on an amount of squares that matched the figure e.g. figure 4 added on 4 more squares. How could we work out a bigger figure, like figure 55? Mrs Heyns taught us the algebraic equation which was (n + 1) x n / 2 e.g. (4 +1) x 4 / 2 = 10 squares! Can you work out another figure using this equation?

MADE Awards

Room 3 and 4 spent some time this term creating entries for the MADE Awards. We broke in to Year 4 and Year 3 and decided as a group what category to enter in to. We had music videos, storytelling and adverts. It was so much fun. We have entered them into the competition and hopefully we'll know in the next few weeks whether we've made it in to the finals!

Genius Hour Term 3

We LOVED doing Genius Hour this term. Everyone chose great projects, managed their time well and had something to share in week 9.  Here's a summary of our projects.

Using SOLO to explore circuits

Last week we started looking at current electricity and circuits. We learnt all the circuit symbols and the importance of not having a break in the circuit. Today we used our SOLO thinking to learn more about circuits. We listed (multistructural) the parts of a circuit we learnt about last week. Then in pairs we researched and explained (relational) what each thing was and it's role in a circuit. Then we created (extended abstract) circuits using different combinations. 

El Presidentes Week 4&5

Myspace Bubbles Note Generator

What do you know about Static or Current Electricity?

Room 3 are learning all about electricity! What do you know about static electricity or current electricity?

Fun with Static Electricity

We continued our exploration of static electricity. We explored what objects we could manipulate just with the static electricity we created by rubbing a balloon on our hair! We discovered we could make pencils and rulers spin, plastic float and pick up small pieces of paper. We could also rub plastic bags and make it stick to our hands. It was a fabulous opportunity to discover!

What is Electricity?

Today we starting learning about electricity! We started by thinking about all the things we couldn't do if we had no electricity. Then we watched a video and learnt lots of new words like voltage, electrons, atoms and more. We talked about the difference between static electricity and current electricity. Then we had fun making static electricity by rubbing balloons on our hair!

El Presidentes T3 Weeks 1-3

Cool Flash Comments

Teach Me Tuesday - Week 2 and 3

Last week we got to shake our hips when Bella taught us how to hula. We learnt how make a figure 8 with our hips and how to rotate our wrists correctly. After that, Alex taught us some basics on the guitar. He was impressed with how quickly some of us picked up some of the chords. Today Ben showed us his amazing model solar system and quizzed us on facts about the planets. Then we got to make our own mini planets, complete with glitter! Later on, Finn taught us how to fold paper planes and we headed outside to see who was the Olympic paper plane flyer. Ryan took gold, Bella took silver and the hotly contested bronze (we had to do a re-throw) went to Omanaia.

Exploratorium Trip

We had a great time discovering lots of weird and wonderful things at the Exploratorium today!

Inquiry Learning

We had a fantastic trip to the Exploratorium today. When we got back to school we completed a reflection chart, which included deciding an area of science we would like to learn more about. We graphed our choices and the top choice was electricity! We all had fun with the Von Graff machine today and want to know more about how electricity works. Our next two top choices was archaeology and kitchen science.
Graph

Teach Me Tuesday Term 3 (and end of Term 2!)

Yesterday Omanaia's dogs Peaches and Mista were bought in so Omi could teach us all about them. She had a wonderful poster to share and we learnt a lot about looking after dogs. Then Georgie taught us how to make paper poppers. It was interesting to see how some were louder than others.  At the end of Term 2 Jessica taught us how to make an origami bunny and bear. Then we went outside to learn some basketball with Tim and Ryan (photos of the boys lesson to come)

Abby's spelling words

              my spelling words for term 3

Alex's spelling practice

Te wiki o te Reo Maori - Day 3

Today we were learning the colours of the rainbow in Te Reo. Room 3 could make the rainbows any way they wanted! What a creative bunch you all are.

Te Wiki o te Reo Maori Day 2

Today we had a challenge...how many NZ place names could we find that had either Roto (lake) Maunga (mountain) or Moto (island) in it! Isabelle and Emily found the most (they found 10!) 

El Presidentes Week 7-10

Te Wiki o te Reo Maori 2016

Today we are trying to share Maori greetings in a creative way.  Students this morning did different things like making posters, writing on the doors and windows and decorating notes. Then we decided to video ourselves making a greeting with our bodies!

Teach Me Tuesday Week 9

This week Danya had our attention captured with traditional Korean string games. She was very organised with little bags of string for everyone. We learnt how to do the 'Cat's Cradle' in pairs. Then Isabelle wowed us with her piano skills. She taught several students how to play a basic tune and had organised a musical word find for those waiting. I love Teach Me Tuesday!

Mystery Skype

Last Friday we did a Mystery Skype with another school. We had to ask each other questions to guess where we lived and then what schools we went to. Each person had a special job to do. We had to wear our jumpers backwards or take off our school shirts so they couldn't see our school name on our uniform! Our MS school was Tahatai Coast school in Papamoa. We can't wait to do a MS again.

Teach Me Tuesday Week 7 & 8

Room 4 joined us for TMT in week 7. The students were split across the two lessons. Zoe started teaching us how to paper mache balloons in order to make an octopus. This is a long process so we will have to finish these over a few weeks. Troy took another group outside and taught them basketball skills. Today Ian and Aryaan taught us how to play Mine Caves on the computer. Then Emily had us folding paper and cutting out the Chinese character 'Xi', which is hung when couples get married.