Room 26's Class Blog

 Today was our first day having swimming lessons for the year. We will have 2 weeks now, and another couple of weeks later in the year.   Fingers crossed there are no extra lockdowns that stop us from swimming this year, and that we remember to bring our togs each day.

 To get our ideas clear on how the Moon orbits Earth, while Earth orbits the Sun, we have tried to visualise it in a number of ways.   At times we have watched some of our classmates acting out and dancing orbits around the person acting as the Sun standing in the centre of the class.  We have also watched a classmate holding a Globe, while another person is trying to spin it, while they both walk around another person pretending to be the Sun. Finally we made our own models that showed the Moon and Earth orbiting around the Sun. For some of us, this was also new having to use split pins that meant our planet could go around in circles.  We had lots of help from each other to make these, which was really great.

 There is much excitement in Room 26 with a Solar System jigsaw puzzle underway. At different times of the day, a few extra pieces are added, but with 500 pieces to sort through, it may take a bit longer before we can show the finished picture.  Great way of helping us visualise the planets in the Solar System that we have been finding out about. Maths has also been very hands on.  We are using centimetre cubes, 10 centimetre cube strips and 100 centimetre cube blocks to fill container spaces.  This is really helping us see what the capacity of containers are.  Our challenge for the end of the week was to see how big a 1 meter cube was - we're still working on the idea of this to work out the capacity of our class.  Getting the floor surface is slightly easier, but having to work out the height of our class is   something else.   

 It has been a busy few weeks, not helped by the changing class numbers as families isolate.  We have had the chance though to review the 5Ws and H, work on extending a sentence to give it more detail for our readers, and now naming the parts in a sentence that actually provides the detail - verb/adverbs and nouns/adjectives. For art we have been mastering our scissor skills to create artwork using both positive and negative space: the art medium of Notan. And even in maths, working on our number skills; reading and understanding maths word problems; while also recognising how making models both out of equipment or in drawings can help us solidify and prove our ideas to solve the question. Lastly, it has been taking us some time to settle into what to do independently during our Daily 5 Reading programme.  Fingers crossed for being ready to work on this so that others can start their group reading. What we've been up to   and pingpong toss click on these video links...

 Hello and welcome to 2022's Room 26. Our first week has really given us a chance to settle in smoothly with 2 days in our first week, and 4 days in our second.  Definitely a good transition period for our new class. We have talked to each other about what we need to help us do our Mahi.  The aim by the end of Week 2 is to have created a Mahi agreement that we can use to support each other, and also know what each of us expect from each other. We are also starting to make the class walls our own, creating About Me visual posters for display.  And we have been set a reading challenge, with the aim of reading a book that then gets recorded on a leaf.  We really want lots of leaves so that our book character Jack can climb the beanstalk to the Giant's castle.  To make sure we have a stalk to add out leaves to, we split up and given 1 sheet of paper that we tried to make the longest paper chain from.  It certainly was interesting to see the range of ideas ...

Our last days of school saw us being architects, builders, decorators and problem solvers. We were set with the task of building our own gingerbread houses, and learnt new skills in cardboard construction, especially using flaps and moulding to join our walls and roof. Here are our Christmas pimped houses.

 Since we have been back in class, we have read a number of books about being respectful and showing responsibility.  The last book we read was called the A Little Spot of Responsibility: a story of making good choices by Diane Alber.  After talking about the different ways we show that we are being responsible or helpful at home, we then thought about what we did at school that showed we are being responsible in our learning and working with other students in our school. From our ideas we chose some that we felt were specific to us, adding them to our own spots.  This is our final presentation, finished in time so that we could hang it in our new classroom for our last week together.