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!
Today was New Zealand Shakeout Day where lots of school children like us and adults at work took part in a massive earthquake drill. When the clock said 9:26am the bell rang three times to tell us that the 'fake' earthquake had started.
We had to quickly hide under the tables, cover our heads and hold on to the furniture!
When the 'shaking' stopped we lined up outside and our teachers checked to see if we were all there. Phew! We survived!
Watch this video that explains what to do if there was an earthquake.
We had a good look at a bean seed today and drew it before we planted it! We are going to take our little seed home and take care of it during the holidays. Our teachers want to see if we can take care of something special called 'life'!
We are also growing some lettuce seeds hydroponically. The seeds were planted in a material called rockwool and watered. They sprouted after two days! We think we'll be making salad in a few weeks!
Our teacher showed us some vegetables in jars of water. She asked us to predict what would happen to them if they just stayed there for a few weeks. Here is what we've predicted might happen to them.
We also made a prediction about how tall the bean plants in Jack's garden will be when we return to school after the holidays. Here are some of our ideas.
Our teacher told us the story of Jack and the Beanstalk using a real mini garden, a toy house and little puppets. She planted 5 'magic' bean seeds in the garden and now we are waiting to see if they grow. We hope there isn't a real horrible giant at the top of our beanstalk!
Some children in our class have been learning how to compare numbers. They have looked to see which of two numbers is the largest and made the crocodile mouth open towards that number! The crocodile is always hungry for the biggest number!
Our teacher taught us a card game to play with a buddy. We each turned over a card and the person who had the highest number could keep both cards! The person with the most cards at the end of the game was the winner!
Here is the student who won 'Student of the Week' at Assembly. The teachers were so impressed that he was able to give some statements about a graph that he made. What a clever cookie!
Today Mr Len Brown, the Mayor of Auckland, visited our school! He was invited to visit Arahoe School by a student from Room 13. We had a special powhiri (a Maori welcoming ceremony) in our hall for him. We sang songs for Mr Brown and our principal and some students greeted him with speeches. Mr Brown spoke to us and told us that he was so excited to be visiting our school. He sang us a special song in Maori.
We have been practicing our letters on chalkboards and now some of us are starting to write words and sentences! Our teachers are excited to see us getting so clever at sounding out words!
We have been drawing pictures of our families. We are going to use the information from our drawings to make a class graph to find out the most common family size.
We have a special 'treasure box' in our classroom filled up with lots of cute objects. Sometimes we take one out and write a description of it. Here is one of our stories from this week.
Today was such a fun day. We got to dress up like clowns, magicians and circus performers! Even the teachers got dressed up. When we got to school our teachers put face paint on us to make us look even more like funny clowns.
During the term we have all been practicing a circus act. The best performers put on a show today. We saw the best hula hoopers, plate spinners, jugglers, acrobats, clowns and unicyclists.
This little performer won second prize in our talent show
During the week we were thinking about how to paint a clown face. We coloured pictures to show how we'd paint it. We think that clowns would have a big smile, a round, red nose and bright eye shadow!
Because we have only been at school a short time it is hard for us to write stories by ourselves so our teacher helps us. We paint a picture then our teacher asks us to tell us the story and she writes it down. Here is one of the stories from this week.
We read a big book this week called 'The Dancing Dragons'. It was about some dragons who dressed up to go dancing. Since we are learning about the circus we decided to dress up some clowns!
This week we learnt that compound words are made when two words are joined together to make one word. Some compound words are 'butterfly', 'bookcase' and 'cupboard'. We looked at some pictures of compound words and drew the two words that made each of them.
One of our classmates brought a leaf bug to school. We are not sure of its real name but we called it a leaf bug or a leaf moth. It had large wings that were green with tiny brown spots so them. They looked exactly like leaves. Some boys in the class explained to us that the bug uses camouflage to help hide from preditors such as birds.
Look at this video of an insect called a 'Walking Leaf'. Its body also looks exactly like a leaf!
This week we learnt the song 'Punchinello'. After we learnt how to say the words our teacher taught us how to sing the song. When we all knew the words we started to play a game. We chose one of the children in the class to be Punchinello, a funny clown. Then we sang the first verse.
What can you do, Punchinello, funny fellow?
What can you do, Punchinello, funny you?
The child who was pretending to be Punchinello had to stand up and show us something that a funny clown would do! Then we sang the next verse.
We can do it too, Punchinello, funny fellow.
We can do it too, Punchinello, funny you!
We all stood up and copied the action that 'Punchinello' did! Afterwards, we sang the next verse, asking 'Punchinello' to choose the next person to take his/her place.
You choose one of us, Punchinello, funny fellow.
You choose one of us, Punchinello, funny you!
Look at us here copying the funny actions of one Punchinello.
Look at this video of other children and a clown singing 'Punchinello'!
