Koko's Inquiry Into Space

We brainstormed questions about space. I chose my question "is space cold?". Then I highlighted it and I went on a chrome book. I had to read all of the information and find the bits I needed to answer my question. Here is what I found out:

Iose In The Zone!

Iose hasn't always found writing easy! In fact not so long ago he was telling Mrs C how tricky spelling was for him. This is his writing after our Making Rain experiment (check out the post on this blog) Mrs C was so impressed at his detail and spelling that she wanted to share it here for you all to see. Iose, I am so proud of you and how hard you try!

Celebrating Chromebooks in Room 2

Last week we were given 10 Chromebooks for our class to use in our classroom programmes.  Some of us were so excited that we ran up to Mr Uluilelata to deliver a ginormous hug followed by "Thank you for our Chromebooks, we LOVE them!"

We have learned:
How to handle them with love.
How to log on and make sure we sign out.
How to log into our studyladder accounts so that we can practice skills at our level set by Mrs C.
How to use these as part of our Genius Hour.
How to put them away and most of all, how to help each other through learning a new process that can at times be rather frustrating.

Mrs C has been so impressed with her class that she asked Mr Uluilelata to please give the star award to all of Room 2 as they have certainly demonstrated being responsible for their own learning (this includes our learning tools).

Here are some photos of our class using our Chromebooks for the first time.  In one of these photos you can see us working together to help each other when it became hard or we got stuck.

Louis Loves Learning!

This young man is just loving his learning in maths at the moment.  He set himself a personal challenge, to be able to count on and back (a strategy he struggled to use just a few short weeks ago).  His work has recently been on display in our classroom as he mastered counting on, ask him how to do it, he will happily explain it.
This past week he has been learning to count back from a number to work out the answer.
Check out this budding young mathematician at work:

Radical Rain!

In our writing programme we have been using lots of science based activities to get our minds excited and to bring out all of the awesome vocabulary that we get from these activities.  Our aim is to improve our writing by one whole year in only 15 weeks!

This writing motivation was all about rain and how it happened.  This led on to learning about the water cycle and how rain clouds formed.  We were shocked to learn that we are still using the same water that the dinosaurs used to survive.

Here are some photos of our experience for you to look at:

This is what we used to make rain.

                                              We added some water droplets (blue stuff)

After Naomi added her water droplets our cloud started to get heavy!

Can you see what happened?

Eventually our cloud got so heavy that it rained...a lot!

We are writing explanations about how rain happens this week in our writing.  Ask us about our learning at home, we have lots to share.  Here is a snapshot of our learning about the water cycle:

GeoBoard Whizz Kids

This week Mrs C introduced us to a new iPad app, it is called GeoBoard.  She wanted us to use this app to share our learning about shape.

We had to work in a team of 2 and Mrs C chose our working partners.  This was so we didn't always work with the same people.  Collaborative learning means being able to work together in a range of ways and with a range of learning buddies.

We know that there are 2 and 3 dimensional shapes.  We also know that there are regular and irregular polygons and that you can reflect, rotate, translate and tesselate shapes.  Here are some pictures of us creating our maths masterpieces.

Mrs C will upload our creations soon, ask us questions about what we did.

This is a free app so if you have an iPad at home any one of our experts will be able to show you how to use it.

Skoolbo Class Challenge

Congratulations to the following leaders on the leaderboard in our class Skoolbo Challenge! Keep working hard my Superheroes, you really are the most awesome bunch of lovelies!

Room 2 Making a SPLASH!

This past week we have started our swimming instruction at Cannons Creek Pool with the awesome Dash Swim School.  We have had a lot of fun and learned a lot from the 5 lessons we have had so far.  Mrs C finds it really hard to stand on the side cheering us on, she knows she is missing out on joining in on all the fun.  Here are two updates, the lower one is one from earlier in the week when Mrs C was away with sick kids, the top one is from our swimming on Wednesday when Mrs C was with us.  More updates to come!

Matariki Celebration

Last week Rangikura School saw it's first Matariki celebration.  All of the classes worked really hard to develop and share an aspect of how Matariki has been celebrated historically, right up to the modern day.  Here is a snapshot of the night, can you tell which part we contributed?