Description Writing - Our Creature Zoo

Mr Lewzey read us the Gruffalo where we learned that the mouse was giving the other animals in the story a description of the Gruffalo.  Here is a video of the story if you have not heard it before:

We decided that we were going to create our own creature zoo where we were able to write some descriptions of creatures that we made up.  We now know that we need the following parts of a description:

• An introduction to introduce our creature.
• Characteristics to help describe our creature.
• Some information that helps us show our thoughts or feelings about our creature.

Here are our descriptions - we were able to refine these by reading them to others and checking to see if it made sense to our buddies.

We then got to create an picture of our creature to help show our readers what our descriptions could look like if they were to meet them.  Please come into the hub and see our creature zoo if you get a chance!

Bees by Callum and Finn

We read an article called 'Dancing Bees'.  To apply our understanding, we had to read some other texts to understand why bees may dance or move to communicate.  We chose to create a video to show you our learning.

We hope you enjoy it!

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!

Pink Shirt Day in Hub Whenua

What a great turn out for Pink Shirt Day in Hub Whenua!  Here is some more information about Pink Shirt Day.

Koalas by Ella and Lucy

We read a story called 'Bushfires in the Koala Reserve'.  To apply our understanding, we created a video where we hoped to build others knowledge about koalas as we felt that some of the characters in the text did not have a good understanding of koalas.  We used both our knowledge and some other texts on Get Epic to share some information about koalas.

We hope you enjoy it!

Learner Led Conferences

Here is the information that we will be using to help us to understand how to discuss our learning at Learner Led Conferences this week.

Crazy Cookies Reading Group - Icebreakers!

This week our group read 'Icebreakers'.  We were learning how to imagine what the author meant by drawing images in our minds.

An icebreaker is a special ship that helps break ice to allow other ships to sail through water that would usually be difficult to travel through.

One of our follow ups was to describe how the icebreakers work in our own words, either drawing a picture or using some of the images from the text.

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

Ivan:

Eleanor:

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:

Anzac Ted

Mr Lewzey read us the book 'Anzac Ted' this week - this is a story about a teddy bear who went to World War One and then returned home where he was passed through the family to the soldier's grandson who brought him to school to share at a Toy Show.

Here is a YouTube recording of the story if you want to listen to it:

As a follow up activity, we had to imagine that we were Anzac Ted and write a letter to the boy's class explaining our back story.  Here are some of letters:

ARLO:

JACK:

LUCY:

ELLE:

Lets get into writing for Term 2

Today Mr Lewzey asked us to tell him what we wanted to write about for this term.  Look at all our ideas we have written on the post it notes - we cannot wait to start exploring some of these topics!