What happened in this, the third week of the third term!

SCHOOL IS CLOSED ON WEDNESDAY!

Reading

Mr Horn's reading class has three reading groups: Piwakawaka, Kereru, and Kea. Both the Piwakawaka and Kereru are reading chapter books in class to learn about developing their comprehension of more complicated text and maintaining meaning over longer stories. As such we are reading a single story over an entire week. On Thursday, the final reading session of the week, the students in these groups will bring home their guided reading chapter book for the weekend.  Every other day of the week they will have a chapter book from their browsing box that they can read at home. At the beginning of each reading session Mr Horn checks in with them if they have finished their browsing box  chapter book, if they have they can swap it for another, if not they can keep the book for another night. 

Writing

Our emotional hooks this week have been related to our science topic. Mr Horn's class learned about liquid density by layering different liquids: oil, water, and dish wash liquid. No matter what order we put them in the glass they always ended up un the same order. Even when we mixed everything together the oil and water would seperate in about 10 minutes.

Mr Morehu's class made borax crystals and had a lot more success than Mr Horn's crew did. They followed the scientific method and looked at what we did and changed one thing: the water-to-borax ratio.

Ms O'Loughlin's class looked at how plants absorb liquid and can change their colour. They put white flowers in food colouring and the flours changed colour.

Maths

There is a lot to learn when it comes to numeracy! Most of the time we split our focus between improving our number knowledge (ie. how to read and write numbers, our to count, skip count, etc) and learning different strategies to solve problems (such as adding using place value so a question like 721+143=? becomes 1+3=4, 20+40=60, 700+100=800, 800+60+4=864). 

Lately we have also been working on word problems and problem solving. Mr Horn gave us a tricky question this week: A bus driver picks up three people and her first stop. She drops off one at her second and picks up five more. At her third stop she picks up eleven more people and four get off. How many people are on the bus? So solve this problem we were allowed to use any strategy, any material, and any method that we liked. We shared our ideas and discussed all the different ways we could have got the answer. Maybe you could have a go at home and share the way you got the answer (it's 15 by the way, don't forget the bus driver!).`

Topic

In science this week we have been learning about floating and sinking. To learn about this first we guessed what things might float or sink. We tested our hypothesis about what would float or sink to see if we were right. We then did an experiment called "Dancing Raisins" where we put raisins in lemonade. The experiment demonstrated that when the gas bubbles attached themselves to the raisins large surface area they were able to raise the raisins to the top of the jar, however when the bubbles burst, the raisins would sink back down to the bottom. They did this over and over, so it looked like they were dancing.

PE

In PE this week we perfected the hedgehog roll and added the elephant roll to our growing set of rolls. The elephant roll is the trickiest one we have learned so far. We start in a straddle shape with one knee on the mat and the other leg and arm pointing off the mat. We drop onto our shoulder blade, careful not to pin our elbow behind our backs. We roll over and when we come back up we are on our opposite knee with our other arm and leg pointing out.

What's Coming Up?

- On Wednesday the school is closed due to the teacher union strike action.

- Mr Horn is on ICT release on Tuesday

- The Year 5s are hosting a whole school assembly on Monday