Performing Arts

This Term Room 5 have been doing Performing Arts with Mrs Hooke. They performed a dance for Mrs Saker, "The Mango Tango". Mrs Saker was very impressed by the creative movements and wonderful partner work she saw!

Mighty Magnets!

This Term we have enjoyed learning about magnets. We looked at all the ways magnets can be used to help us in our daily lives. We have learned that they can attract and repel each other, depending on which poles are closest to each other (North or South). We investigated which objects are magnetic and non-magnetic. We explored a few magic tricks using magnets. We also designed our own peg fridge magnets to help us keep important things like school notices, spelling or reading rockets and basic fact carriages in a handy spot on the fridge.

Look at our fantastic peg fridge magnets!

Hosting Junior Assembly in Term 3

Room 5 did a fantastic job of hosting Junior Assembly in Week 8 of Term 3. We shared our marvellous magic hats and enjoyed telling the other children what are magic hats could turn us into! Here are some photos of the hosts:

Beach Clean Up

This week was Conservation Week. On Friday afternoon the Junior classes went down to the beach to help pick up rubbish. It was very windy down at the beach! We found all kinds of rubbish including lots of plastic and polystyrene. Let's hope the beach stays clean for awhile now!

Big Buddy Time

Room 5 love spending time with their big buddies from Room 24 every Friday. Here we are listening to our big buddies read stories to us outside:

Jump Off!

On Friday morning we had the Junior School Jump Off. Each class went around 6 different skipping activities. This was excellent fitness and a great chance to show off the skipping skills we have been developing this Term. Many children achieved the skipping goals they had set for themselves. Here are some photos of Room 5 doing the 'non-stop' skipping activity. How long can you skip without stopping?

Gymnastics

Over the first four weeks of Term 3, Room 5 developed their skills in Gymnastics. Here are some photos of us doing warm ups. The warm ups helped us to develop our balance, coordination and teamwork. Here we are practicing....
-  different ways to balance
- catching feathers on different parts of our bodies
- making symmetrical body shapes with a buddy
- making alphabet letters in small groups



Here are some of the skills we learned over the four weeks:
- jumps off the vault, springboard and trampoline
- walking across the beam
- swinging and climbing the ropes

Pyjama Day!

Another great fundraiser for KidsCan. You looked fantastic in your pyjamas Room 5 and great effort skipping in your PJs!

100 Days at School

We celebrated 100 days of being at school this year so far. Here is a photo of our fabulous 100 Day Glasses. There is also a slideshow of some of our 100 Day activities.

Brainy Room 5!

Last Friday, our buddies helped us put together our brain caps. This morning they came back again to help 'fine-tune' them. We love wearing our brain caps - thank you big buddies!

Here is a slideshow of our buddies helping us last Friday:

Brain Gym

This week is Brain Week at Muritai School. In Room 5 we have been learning about the different parts of the brain. We have also been learning some 'brain gym' exercises to help our brains with new learning. These exercises include crossing our arms and legs over to the other side of our bodies and writing with our non-dominant hands. We also had a go at the 'double doodle', where both hands draw at the same time, to form a symmetrical picture. Here are some examples of the double doodle:

Carter Observatory

This week we visited the Carter Observatory in Wellington. The Year 1s went on Tuesday and the Year 2s went on Thursday. It was a great chance for us to put into practice some of the things we had already learned about space, and also to learn some new things!

Here we are at the human sundial. It uses our shadows to tell the time:

The people who work at the Observatory taught us some new things about day and night and the solar system:

We had a go being the sun with a flashlight. We shone the sun (flashlight) on the moon to show the different phases of the moon:

We had time to explore the galleries and also watched a movie called, "Tycho in Space". We really enjoyed our visits to the Observatory!

The Great Easter Egg Hunt

This week we made our own wonderful looking cardboard easter eggs. Then the Easter Bunny (or Hazel, in an Easter Bunny costume) collected them from us and hid them in the playground.
On Thursday after lunch all the Year 1s and 2s went hunting for their easter eggs - we had a lot of fun! When we found our egg, we exchanged it for a REAL chocolate egg - yum!
Here are some photos of us hunting for our easter eggs.

Wacky Hair Day

Look at the wacky hair in Room 5! Well done everyone for supporting such a worthy cause...Child Poverty. Check out "KidsCan" http://www.kidscan.org.nz/ for more information on how our donations go towards helping out children in need.

Hosting Junior Assembly

On Friday, Room 5 hosted Junior Assembly. Everyone in Room 5 was a great role model, sitting up the front with excellent listening manners. Our hosts Jack M and Clara did a fantastic job of speaking clearly in loud voices so that we could all hear what was happening.
We shared our Seaweek sketches of the things we found at the beach and some of us shared our writing describing what we found. Well done Room 5!

Here are some photos of the Assembly:

Seaweek

On Tuesday afternoon we visited the beach to celebrate Seaweek. We worked in small groups to be 'beach detectives' by looking carefully inside hoops that we placed on the sand. We found many interesting things and were able to get in 'close up' by looking through magnifying glasses.
Here are some of the things we found:

Swimming Festival Fun

On Tuesday it was the Junior School Swimming Fun Festival. Everyone in Room 5 tried their very best and had so much fun on the day! Here are some photos of us in our relay events:

Statistics

Room 5 read the big book, "Number 10 Tāwai Crescent". Then we did some Statistics to find out more about our own addresses and the people who live at our homes. We also drew our own fabulous letterboxes and wrote our home letterbox numbers on them. After Mrs Saker had photocopied the letterboxes, we spent time with a buddy finding many different ways to sort them into matching groups. We then turned our favourite way to sort them into a pictograph and talked about what we found. You can see our letterbox art and pictographs up on the wall in Room 5. Here are some photos of us sorting our letterboxes:

Car Crash Simulator

Today Constable Julie visited Muritai School to teach the Juniors about seatbelt safety.

We all had a turn in the car crash simulator.
"Who is crazy enough to want to have a car crash this morning?" Constable Julie asked the class.
"I am!" cried Sienna. It was her turn first.
We had to sit in the seat, do up our seatbelt and then......the seat sloooowly moved backwards until it was at the top of a little ramp. Then the seat started moving downhill at 7km an hour, before...CRASH! Suddenly the seat stopped moving but our bodies kept going - lucky we had our seatbelts on!

Everyone said they were very happy to be wearing a seatbelt and that was travelling at just 7km an hour. Most of the time in a car we're moving at around 50km an hour.

Check out these photos of us in the car crash simulator:

Swimming Fun!

Over the last two weeks we have been lucky enough to have swimming lessons with fantastic instructors. On Friday it was our last lesson with them.
After practicing some of the skills we had learned over the two weeks, we had some fun learning how to keep safe in the water.
The instructors turned the pool into a wave pool and we had to make it across from one side of the pool to the other - we got very wet doing this!!!
Then the whole class worked to turn the pool into a whirlpool by running around the sides in the same direction. Then, we took our feet off the bottom of the pool to float and let the water push us along. Next we tried to run back in the opposite direction - this was very difficult to start with!!!
We could then choose if we wanted to have a go in the deep pool.
Some of us stayed in the shallow pool and had fun diving to the bottom to fetch rings and batons. We also had races with the noodles.
Those of us who went into the deep pool practiced hopping into the pool safely by keeping hold of the side of the pool. This helps us test how deep a pool is and if we can touch the bottom or not - most of us could not! We had turns doing 180 jumps into the pool and then we swum about a third of the length of the deep pool without touching the bottom.
Check out these photos of the amazing swimmers in Room 5:

We will still be swimming next week but only on Tuesday and Thursday. Please remember to bring your togs, towels and warm tops.

Welcome back to school 2013!

I hope everyone has had a wonderful holiday. I am looking forward to seeing you again this week. I know we will have a lot of fun getting to know each other.
We will be swimming this week from Tuesday onwards, so please remember to bring your named Sunhats and Swimming gear to school.
Let's hope this amazing weather continues!