Naylor Love and Hutt City Council Mural Contest

Naylor Love and Hutt City Council have invited all primary and intermediate schools to enter the Mural Art competition with the theme, "What we love about the Hutt!" The murals will be erected around the Hutt City Council offices construction site in April. There are some fantastic prizes up for grabs!

Nikau Syndicate has decided to enter a team in the contest.  If a child was interested in being part of the team of eight students, he or she should have brought home a form to complete and submit by Tuesday, 4 March.  To be considered a child needs to draw a picture showing why he or she should be chosen to be in the group. 

Winners will be selected on Tuesday and planning will begin on Wednesday, 5 March.

Room 3 Leaders

Room 3 participated in leadership camp all week.  Today they invited Room 7 and Room 8 to come over so they could use their newly learned leadership skills to teach the kids various activities and games.  We had a fantastic time learning to draw, dance, and play games.  I was so impressed by Room 3's leadership skills.

Descriptive Writing

This week we have been working on using descriptive sentences. We expanded dull sentences by using descriptive words.  Here are some examples we looked at as a class.

Here's our success criteria:

• Each sentence begins with a capital letter.
• Each sentence ends with the correct punctuation (. ? or !).
• Each sentence has at least three descriptive words.

Look at how some students made their sentences grow!

Starting Sentence:
The dog was in the yard.

Improved Sentences:
Jayden: The humungous, furry dog was lying on the cuddly, bright, soft grass.

Ethan: The rough, playful dog was in the sunny yard.

Joanna: The friendly and playful, tiny puppy was in the quiet and totally silent yard while playing with dirty shoes.

Nate: The big, fat, stinky dog was in the yard.

Rose: The brown, smooth dog was in the grassy yard.  

Leigh: The soft, black dog is in the muddy, grassy yard.  

Michael: A dirty, fast dog was in the muddy, sloping yard. 

Starting Sentence:
The ball was rolling.

Improved Sentences:
Emma: The round, rainbow beach ball was rolling on the crashing waves. 

Tara: The slippery, bright, rainbow ball was rolling down the hill.

Zachary: The tiny, blue, soft ball was rolling down the steep hill.

Noah: The red ball fell down the hill and rolled fast.

Riccardo: The big, red ball was rolling quickly down the hill.

Mia: There was a bright, blue ball rolling down a steep, muddy, wet hill.

Walk, Scoot, or Cycle to School Day!

Text to Self Connections

Today we connected the story Grumpy Nicola to our own life, experiences, and feelings. 

We know readers are always thinking as they read, so as we read Grumpy Nicola we asked ourselves the following questions:

• What does this remind me of in my life?

• What is this similar to in my life?

• Has something like this ever happened to me?

• How does this relate to my life?

Then each of us made a text to self connections using one of the following

statements:

• This reminds me of...

• I understand how Nicola feels because...

• The setting makes me think about another place...

• I experienced this myself...

This reminds me of when I acted like a monkey. 

I experienced this myself because once I couldn't get to sleep and in the morning I was very grumpy. 

It reminds me of this morning because I was tired and when  I am tired I get really, really angry.

This reminds me of when I am grumpy and want to stay home. 

I experienced this myself when I think some places will be boring. 

This reminds me of waking up in the morning and feeling very grumpy and tired. 

This reminds me of not wanting to eat my breakfast.

Introduction to Making Connections

In Room 7, we know that readers are always thinking while they are reading.  We've been practicing the strategies of visualising and making predictions.  Today we had an introduction to making connections.

We learned that when we read something that reminds us of our lives, another book, or something else in the world, it is called making a connection.  The activity we did today will help us remember what it means to make a connection! 

We smelled four different mystery jars.  We made a prediction about what was in the jar and then we connected what was in the jar to something in our own lives.  See if you can guess what was in each jar by reading the students' connections. Also, please be patient with our spelling, as we are still learning. 

CAUTION: Don't scroll too quickly because the answers are below the connections!

Here we are smelling the mystery jars.

Mystery Jar #1

Revealing the Contents

Did you guess popcorn?

Mystery Jar #2

Revealing the Contents

Did you guess laundry detergent?

Mystery Jar #3

Revealing the Contents

Did you guess cocoa powder?

Mystery Jar #4

 Revealing the Contents

Did you guess grass?

Stay tuned for more of our work on making connections!

Metric Me

Today we pretended we were Olympic Athletes and we had to send our stats to the Olympic officials.  We worked with a partner to find the length of different parts of our bodies.  Take a look at some photos of us measuring and some of the finished products.