Book Reviews - Clever Crazy Club and Party Pack Reading Groups

The last week we have been practicing our summarising and retelling skills with creating a book review for other learners to learn about the series that we are currently reading.

Take a look at our reviews and see what book you might like to pick up!  If you have any feedback for us, please leave us a comment!

More Leaves on our Vocabulary Tree

Great to see more people being determined and building their knowledge about the forest.

John Paul - fauna

Jack M - flora

Molly - pohutukawa

Ciara - understory

Ashaani - oak tree

Lucy - pollination

Benjamin - canopy

Finn - dark and birch tree

Yunni - floor

Building Forests with Multiplication Arrays

We have been learning a new strategy in our numeracy learning where we can draw or group an array to show a multiplication fact (4 x 3) and show how it is different to another one (3 x 4) but is the same value.

Here is a video to help explain what an array is:

We chose to make a connection with our learning about the forest and use the duplication function in Explain Everything to make some forests showing our knowledge of arrays.  Here are some examples of our learning:

Haiku Poems with our Alliteration Identities

Last week we have been learning about haiku poems.

Traditional haiku are always the same, including the following features:

1. There are only three lines, totalling 17 syllables.
2. The first line is 5 syllabels.
3. The second line is 7 syllables.
4. The third line is 5 syllables like the first.
5. A haiku does not have to rhyme, in fact usually it does not rhyme at all.

Some haiku can include the repetition of words or sounds.  We made the connection that this is similar to our alliteration learning earlier in the term.

We also made the connection that learning about syllables is similar to the learning we have doing around building our knowledge about word attack.  We also wanted to write about our super hero or villains again.

Numeracy Art - Combining Measurement, Geometry and Area

We are creating some art that Mr Lewzey showed us today - we are looking at using our knowledge of geometry (squares), measurement (using centimeters) and area (working out which of our squares are bigger or smaller).

Here are the instructions that we used to create our art pieces:

Here are some photos of our learning.

Pokemon and Place Value - Addition Agents and Subtraction Squad

We thought Mr Lewzey was a bit crazy when he said that we were going to use Pokemon to help us with our place value strategies.

We were able to create our own Pokemon and then use these numbers to practice both our place value addition and subtraction skills.

Here are our creatures:

The Way Back Home

WALHT write imaginative solutions for problems in a story.

We watched an animated video that was inspired by Oliver Jeffer's picture book called The Way Back Home. The video was paused after we were introduced to the problem of the story - the boy and the alien were both stuck on the moon because both the rocket and the spaceship were broken, oh no! Please read of our creative solutions to solve the very troubling problem. Enjoy!

Alliteration Superheros - Part One!

We decided to explore alliteration in reading this week when Mr Lewzey shared with us this book:

We decided that we wanted to become either super heroes or villains and use some alliteration to help describe our abilities and other information that we wanted to share with you.

Please leave us a comment and tell us what you think about our new identities!

Our Gifted Garden - Lucy and Molly

We read an article called 'Our Gifted Garden'.  To apply our understanding, we had to compare our school with another school - Raumati South School which we found out was an Environschool.  We chose to create a video to show some of the comparisons.

We hope you enjoy it!

Moana Island Reading Group - The Ant and the Grasshopper

This week our group read 'The Ant and The Grasshopper'.  We were learning how to justify our opinion using evidence from the text.

One of our follow ups was to imagine that we were the grasshopper and we had met a new insect who was behaving in the same way as the grasshopper at the beginning of the text.  What advice would we give them based on what we now knew?

Here are some of our stories that we came up with:

Ella S:

Elle:

Gauri:

Lucy:

Molly:

Greetings in Mandarin

We are practicing saying hello and what's your name in Mandarin, enjoy!