Feuerstein

This year Winnie, Po, Simeon, Pelenise, Fasi, Amelia and Maselino have been part of a Feuerstein group with Mrs Raj. This programme supports children to develop metacognitive skills; to consider thinking and learning in an organised, structured way.

Mrs Raj has been really happy with the students progress and so she asked them to share their learning in assembly. Each learner spoke very clearly and confidently about what they have learnt at Feuerstein and they explained how the programme is structured.

Riveting Riddles!

Today in Kiwican we were learning about respecting ourselves and our strengths. We first played a game where we had to tag people by jumping every time a whistle was blown, which was lots of fun for us all!

Then we had a discussion about respect before the next activity was introduced. In this activity, we were split into two teams. The first team went to room 11 with Miss Tuia while the second team stayed with Mr Numia. Miss Tuia's team were given a page of riddles to solve. This involved lots of discussion and sharing of ideas, as the riddles were very challenging.
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Mr Numia's team had to throw a hula hoop over a cone, which was harder than it looked as it could not knock the cone over. We had so much fun taking part in these activities we wanted to continue when the bell rang! Thank you Kiwican for another awesome session.

Friday Afternoon

This afternoon we took our writing to  Room 1 and Mrs Ripata. Earlier in the week we had written stories that would entertain younger children so we thought we would share them with the new entrant and year one students.

After reading our writing we also read some published childrens' books with them. We really enjoyed talking to the children about what they liked in the story and it was interesting to see what they found funny! When we were finished with our reading we helped them to play on the playground. We all had a wonderful time!

Diwali!

This week we have been celebrating Diwali, the festival of light. Mrs Raj came in and talked to us about the way that the festival is celebrated in India and we watched some videos about the story of Diwali. It was great to learn more about a different culture and religion.

Miss Stone asked us to create some Rangoli patterns. Traditionally these are made out of coloured sand and they are used to decorate the entrance to a house. We used felts instead, but we did place our finished designs on the door to our classroom! We also got to try some Indian sweets that Mrs Nath made. These reminded us a bit of donuts as we could taste pastry, butter and sugar.

Te Reo Bingo!

This week in te reo Maori we learnt the name for some of our favourite food and some common foods in te reo Maori. This was to support our current learning which is focused on food and drink.
We will continue to focus on this for the first part of the term, so keep a look out for some of the flash cards that we will be creating!

Buddy Reading

This week we discussed writing for a specific audience, so we decided to write stories and recounts that would entertain the younger students at our school. We spent the first few days of the week writing and illustrating these stories and we all had lots of different ideas - Miss Stone was very impressed!

Here is the beginning of Alex's story, about his early visit from Santa!

Last week on Sunday, Santa came to my house to play with me. We had lots of fun. Santa came in his sleigh with his 8 reindeer and they were all very friendly.

The first place we visited using Santa's sleigh was the candy farm. When we got there we ate lots of chocolate and lollipops and they tasted sweet like honey. When I ate the chocolate it melted in my mouth with joy. After eating all those sweets Santa got FATTER, his face grew more round, his stomach grew out of his shirt and his pants ripped! I asked him if he was okay and he just replied “Ho Ho Ho”.   

Check out Davarni's story about 3 bears:

                  

First Day Highlights

Today we had a class decision regarding the topic "are learning and behaviour the same?".
Some of us argued that we need the right attitude in order to be able to learn and that traits such as determination, resilience, motivation and drive for learning make it more possible for us to learn and achieve more.

However,  other mentioned that learning is not the same as behaviour, because behaviour involves controlling our emotions but learning involves developing knowledge and skills.

We decided to make up a profile of what we consider an active learner to be. We came up with the following:

• Determined to try their best
• Take risks
• Challenge themselves
• Share their ideas with others
• actively listen to others
• Are not afraid to ask for help
• Think critically about what they are learning
• Take responsibility for their learning 
• Take risks and are not afraid to fail
• Take opportunities that you are given e.g. to demonstrate your strategy with the class.
• Set and follow learning goals.

We worked on becoming active learners in our writing lesson, where we worked really hard to meet our writing goals.

Then we focussed on our behaviour in our class soccer match. We made sure that we were respectful and that we acted as team players.