Sunflower Seeds!

On Tuesday, as part of our Inquiry into Life Cycles, we planted our very own sunflower seeds. It's now our job to look after them and help them to grow. How long will it take before we see the first shoots???

Our Swan Plant

This Term our Inquiry topic is around Life Cycles and as part of this we are creating a Butterfly Garden in the Junior School. Room 5 now also have our very own swan plant to take care of. Follow the plant on its journey...

Day 1 - Tuesday 21st February - We transplanted our swan plant into a bigger bucket with holes drilled at the bottom to allow the water to drain.

Day 2 - Wednesday 22nd February - The big swan plant that Mrs Ryan and the junior school have been looking after since the beginning of the Term has no leaves left on it for the caterpillars to eat. So Mrs Saker brought two hungry caterpillars over to Room 5's swan plant to eat some more juicy leaves!

 

Day 3 - Thursday 23rd February - One of our hungry caterpillars is getting ready to turn itself into a chrysalis. The other one is still munching away on the leaves.

Day 4 - Friday 24th February - When we arrived at school this morning we found that the caterpillar had turned itself into a chrysalis overnight. The other caterpillar had started to munch away on the leaf holding the chrysalis!

Day 7 - Monday 27th February - This morning we discovered that over the weekend our second caterpillar had been munching away again at the leaf the chrysalis was on. It was now making itself ready to turn into a chrysalis too...

During lunch time, Mrs Saker was lucky enough to notice the caterpillar turning itself into a chrysalis. First of all, its skin split...

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Then it started to twist and turn around on itself - the children in Room 5 said it looked like it was 'dancing'...

Finally it stopped moving. It had turned into a chrysalis.

Day 28 - Monday 19th March

We arrived at school to find that our first chrysalis had hatched into a beautiful monarch butterfly! 

Day 44 - Wednesday 4th April

So far this Term we have had two butterflies hatch in our classroom and we have three chrysalis on our Swan Plant. 

We will now plant the Swan Plant in the butterfly garden so that if the chrysalis hatch in the holidays, the butterflies will have some food and a place to rest.

RED and BLACK day

Yesterday it was one year since the big February 22nd earthquake in Christchurch. To show our support for the people of Christchurch we wore red and black clothes. At 12.20pm the whole school got together in the hall to have one minute's silence to show our respect.

Thank you everyone for your donations towards Sumner School in Christchurch.

Swimming Lessons

Today Room 5 had our last swimming lesson with the instructors. Over the last two weeks we have been learning to do all kinds of clever things in the water.
We practised gliding along on our tummies with our rocket arms up. We then added in our freestyle arms to help us move easier through the water. Then, we practised floating and gliding along on our backs. We will continue to practise these skills with Mrs Saker for the next couple of weeks. Our swimming days our now Mondays and Wednesdays (first thing in the morning!).

Today we also had some FUN time together in the pool with our instructors :)

Maths Fun

We are learning to use our fingers and tens frames to help us to get pictures in our heads of the numbers from 0 - 10. We are learning to play lots of tens frames games to help us get faster at recognising the number patterns. 

This will help us to quickly work out addition and subtraction problems by helping us understand the different ways we can make a number.

Welcome to Room 5 2012

Welcome back to school!
I hope you all had a wonderful summer break and are ready for the new school year with your new classmates and new teacher. I'm Mrs Saker and I'm very much looking forward to meeting you all on Tuesday. I know we are going to have lots of fun getting to know each other. One interesting thing about me is that I enjoy learning about new cultures and new languages. I taught English as a second language in France and China. I have been teaching at Belmont School for the last four and a half years but my name there was Miss Mercer because a very exciting thing happened to me two weeks ago...I got married to Mr Saker!
I will see you all on Tuesday - remember to bring your Sunhats, your Stationery and Swimming starts this Wednesday.