Welcome Back

Welcome back to school, I just wanted to show something amazing that one of my 5 year olds created last week.

This fantastic Lego aeroplane. 

I put the Lego out as one of our writing activities of the children to explore during a writing session. Lego encourages fine motor skills, problem solving, and creativity, all skills children need for school. We have been very lucky and have been given different Lego bits and pieces, but we are always on the hunt for more!

 

Spring Has Sprung

I can hardly believe it is the 1st September. We wrote stories about spring this morning and spent last week learning about spring for Discovery. Last Friday (29th August) was Daffodil Day in New Zealand and is a fund-raising and awareness day for the Cancer Society. So some of our Discovery activities were about daffodils and Daffodil Day.

The children painted watercolour pictures of a jug of daffodils.

 And we made our own daffodil badges with yellow and orange cupcake cases.

I like how one of my children described it this morning - "the daffodils are waking up."

Cows!

This year Totara Park School started the milk for schools programme and after several weeks of drinking milk each day we have spent the last two weeks learning about cows and where milk comes from. Did you know that cows have 4 stomachs?

We wrote reports about cows and painted these amazing cow portraits. I used this blog post for inspiration for our paintings.

 

Before we wrote our reports we watched some clips from 'Rosie's World' and read some books about cows.

Here are some of our reports:

'Cows are animals. Milk comes from cows. Cows are red and white.'

 'Cows are animals. Cows make milk. Cows eat grass, they burp up the cud. Cows have 4 stomachs. The grass goes into one tummy then into the next tummy.'

'Cows are animals. They make milk. They eat the grass and burp the cud.'

'Cows are animals. They make milk from their udders. They are white and they are brown. Cows eat grass. Then they make milk. They have 4 stomachs.'

 We have also been reading the first verse of The Cow poem by Robert Louis Stevenson. Click here for a pdf.

Queen's Birthday Discovery 2014

I love these royal masks, the J-Block teachers wore them last year for a funny staff photo, and last Wednesday for our Queen's Birthday Discovery session the children enjoyed wearing them too.

 

 We also made these beautiful crowns....

 ... and stunning brooches.

 

Bubbles!

Early last week our senior school buddies came to visit us for some bubble blowing fun. 

After they left we sat down to write about our bubble blowing experience.

My bubbles went over the fence. I blew them myself.

I blew bubbles then I popped them.

I blew big bubbles. They went over the fence.

My bubbles floated away, then they popped.

And later in the week we made bubble art. 

Bubble art is easy, although messy! I mixed some bubble mixture and dye in a cup, and put that cup in an empty ice-cream container to contain any overflow. We used straws to blow up lots of bubbles before popping them with a piece of paper on the top of the cup. 

We have also been reading this bubble poem.

I make my own bubble mixture, it is much cheaper than buying it ready made. 
In a big bottle mix:

1.7 L of water

.3L of cheap dish-washing liquid

2 tablespoons of glycerine (from the pharmacy)

If you can leave the bubble mixture for a few days before using it, it seems work better.

Christmas Craft - Wrapping Presents

From today until we finish school on the 18th December, we will be busy creating all sorts of Christmas crafts and exploring different Christmas themed activities.

Today we wrapped the rock art we completed last week during outdoor week. The children chose the type of paper, the ribbon colour, and of course the lucky recipient! After carefully cutting, folding, and sellotaping, they wrote a label for their present. 

Hopefully all of our gifts made it home safely under the Christmas tree.

My New Alphabet Card for Writing

When I noticed my previous alphabet cards looking a little worn and tatty, I decided to make a new card that fits the needs of my children better.

We use an alphabet card during our writing time. The children have one each. On one side of the card are the letters of the alphabet and a picture associated with that letter. Because I teach phonics using Jolly Phonics, the picture is of the action or image that the children learn for that letter. For example 'a' is a picture of an ant, because of the sound 'a' makes in ant. On the reverse I had a list of commonly used sight words.

My new cards follow the same format, alphabet on one side and sight words on the other. But they are a little prettier!

As well as the letters of the alphabet, I have included the digraphs (two letters that make one sound) that we have been learning, and coloured each row of the alphabet card a different colour. That way I can tell children who are having difficulty locating a particular sound what colour the letter is they need to look for. "You said /a/, /a/ is in the red row." I also had just enough space to fit a little visual reminder about saying the word, listening to the sound, and writing it down. Something we are currently working very hard at achieving independently. (Because I like a hook on my 'y' and a loop on my 'k' I had to play around with a mixture of fonts to get the letters looking how I like to teach them.)  

On the reverse of the alphabet card are 5 boxes of sight words. Each box has a different colour border. That way I can tell the children to look for a word in the blue box or the yellow box. They may not be able to read all of the words, but they may be able to guess with just a little hint at what box to look in. 

In my classroom I have some of the sight words that we use the most in our writing written on little bees that are attached to the wall with sticky velcro. I call these words our 'busy bee' words and if the children need to write them I encourage the children to remove the the word from the wall so they can copy it into their writing book. On my new alphabet card the 'busy bee' words are in a box with a picture of a bee. This gives the children the opportunity to use the alphabet card to copy the 'busy bee' word or find and pull the word straight off the wall.

Click here for a free download of my new alphabet card. 

UPDATED: Click here for an updated version with a 'kiwi' handwriting font.

Perfect Peg Bats

If you visit Room 4 you may need to look out for our hanging peg bats. 

Some of our bats are hanging upside down and some are flying. (We discovered that bats hang upside down because they need to fall down to start flying.)

Believe it or not these bats are part of our phonics programme.

Now that we are masters of saying the sound that each letter makes (and some digraphs too). We have been learning how to segment and blend CVC (consonant, vowel, consonant) words this week. Blending and segmenting simple words is going to be a major focus of our phonics programme for the rest of this term.

Segmenting words involves saying each phoneme (sound) separately. The children are learning to break down a word into each of its individual sounds. We 'robot' each word to hear the phonemes that make up that word. When I teach 'roboting' with the children we move our arms up and down like a robot, one arm movement for each separate sound. 

Blending is about pulling all the sounds together again. When we robot words the last movement is moving one arm across our bodies to sweep the sounds together and saying the whole word at the same time. Bat becomes "/b/-/a/-/t/ - bat."

I have also been teaching the children to imagine that each word is a piece of stretchy chewing gum. We put the word in our mouths and stretch it out with our hand. At the start of the word your hand is near your mouth and as you say the word slowly your hand moves further away from your mouth. By the last stretched out sound your arm has reached right out away from your mouth. Bat becomes "/b/..../a/...../t/.....

This week we were looking at /a/ as the medial (middle) phoneme, next week we will practise /o/ as in 'dog'.

  

Because these bats are so cute (and I love peg animals) I have made these bats with my classes a couple of times now. Click here and here to have a look at our bats from previous years.

Because we were making bats we wanted to find out some facts about bats. So we watched some amazing bat videos on You Tube. Here are a couple of them:

We wrote these bat facts:

Did you know?

'Bats eat the moths.'

'Bats sleep upside down.'

'Bats have wings and long fingers.'

'Bats use echo to bounce squeaks.'

'Bats eat insects. Bats drink water.'

'Bats feed their babies milk.'

'Bats can climb on trees.'

'Bats echo to find moths. Then they eat them.'

Buzzing Bees

 Here is the start of something special ....

.... these gorgeous footprint bees.

 They are busy buzzing around our classroom. 

 We have been watching, reading, writing, and talking about honey-bees. 

We saw this amazing You Tube clip showing a queen bee laying eggs in her hive. The worker bees stroke and lick her while she lays the eggs. We found out that when the eggs turn into larvae the worker bees feed them honey and bee milk.

The Fat Bee Man showed us how bee-keepers get the honey out of the honeycomb. And we enjoyed taste testing two different types of honey - runny honey and creamed honey. 

We wrote these bee facts:

 

The bees make honey in the hive. Bees keep the honey in the honeycomb.

Bees make honey to feed the larvae.

The queen bee lays the eggs. The worker bees give the queen royal jelly.

The bee stings with his stinger. It really hurts.

First the bee is an egg and it turns into a larvae. It turns into a pupa and then it’s a bee!