Kia ora (hello) and thank you for visiting our blog! We are a bunch of enthusiastic first and second year students who enjoy learning in the Arahoe Learning Hub (Rooms 21 and 22) at Arahoe School (Auckland, New Zealand). We hope you enjoy reading about our adventures at school!
We studied letter 'q' this week and were lucky enough to see an American quarter. We learnt that quarter means 25 cents. We noticed that the quarter has the face of a man on it. In New Zealand our coins have the portrait of Queen Elizabeth II on them.
We tried sitting and balancing on a unicycle for the first time yesterday! It was such fun! We had to support our friends so that they could balance on the seat. It was much harder to balance on the unicycle than we expected. Some of the unicycles were too big for us and we wobbled a lot.
It was much easier to balance ourselves against the railings of the fence.
It was a bit scary when we lost our balance
but when we got back on top we kept right on smiling!
We had a special treat this morning! Four clever acrobats from the Zirka Circus came to our school and put on a short show for us. It was amazing to see how flexible and agile they are. They moved so gracefully together to create complicated shapes with their bodies. We were surprised to learn that the youngest acrobat is only 13 years old!
This is what two children said about the performance we saw today -
"I saw four acrobats doing flips on each other. They were so flexible!"
"Two girls made a bridge then two girls went on top. It looked scary.
They fell down gently and made another shape."
WARNING
Please don't try and copy what the acrobats are doing in our photos
unless you have an expert with you to make sure you are safe.
(These acrobats performed today in front of their coach who was there to check on their safety
Some children have been making graphs this week during Maths time. One group of children had to cut out pictures of hats and sort them out according to colour. They pasted the hats to make a graph.
Here are some statements that we made about the information on the graph:
I can see one brown hat.
There are 7 yellow hats and that is the most.
The black hats have one less than the yellow hats.
We've only been a class for six weeks and today we had to say goodbye to one of our classmates who is moving to Australia. We will miss L and wish her family the best. Oh, and thanks so much for the Tiny Teddies you shared with us today!
We had a whole school assembly today. Here are some of us sitting up like 'super listeners' ready for the procession of nations to begin!
Some children walked into the hall wearing their national costume and carrying their national flag. We heard the National Anthem for each country too. There was a big cheer when the children representing New Zealand walked in!
Our teacher told us that she has seen an elephant paint a picture! We were surprised and curious about that so she brought the painting in to show us. The elephant held a paint brush in its trunk and painted long green stalks then it dipped the brush into red paint and painted bright red flowers. What a clever elephant!
Here is a video of an elephant called Srisayam painting some flowers.
Because we are learning about the circus this term we are also working on a circus act! Some of us are doing hula hooping, others are juggling and spinning plates. A few of the boys are learning how to walk on stilts. Here are some of the children from our class practicing their act.