Our class Little Garden

Here is our NW Little Garden that we got from School Kit. We have the following plants growing: 

• Purple tansy
• Sunflower
• Sweet Pea

We planted our seeds 12 days ago and look how much they have grown!

Room 18 are also growing seedlings that they planted at the same time. Their plants are a little bit bigger as they kept them inside and nice and warm last week when the weather was cooler and ours went outside. This is interesting to see the difference that being in a warmer place can make to the growth of our seedlings.

Here are Room 18's seedlings today:

Checkpoint/Radio New Zealand Video about our Orchestra Week

Christchurch Symphony Orchestra at Banks Avenue School

This week we have been so lucky to have 5 awesome musicians from the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra (CSO) in residence at Banks Avenue School.
Each class has been learning a piece to play at a concert on Friday at 1.15pm as well as take part in a massed item with the whole school.

We have been learning to play the ukulele and the hand drums to play along with Sarah on the violin in an Irish Medley.

We have been practicing hard and can't wait until our performance at Shirley Boys High School.

Marvellous Mathematicians

The Triangles maths group has been busy learning to add big numbers and have been using Animal Arrays to help them with their learning.

Gymnastics

We have been learning gymnastics skills this term including rolling, jumping and balancing. These skills will help us at our gymnastics session on Monday 18th September at Christchurch School of Gymnastics!

Welcome to Miss Kirk

Welcome to Miss Kirk who is our second year student teacher in our class until the end of term 3!

Gymnastics

We have been learning to balance in our gymnastics sessions over the past 2 weeks. On Tuesday we used some equipment to practice our balancing on.

Team Unicorn singing Whakataka te Hau

Whakataka te Hau has been our morning waiata during term 2. Here we are singing it.

World Milk Day

On June 1st it was World Milk day.
We are lucky to have milk everyday at school and we drink it while we listen to our afternoon story.

Paper Planes

We experimented with aeronautics today by making Paper Planes. First we worked together with a buddy. One buddy knew how to make a paper plane and helped someone who hadn't made one before.  We tried creating our paper planes with different designs - some with pointed noses, some with wide wings and some long and thin. We are visiting Air Force Museum on Thursday to learn even more about Flight, we can't wait!

Skoolbo Personal Bests from Learning Hub 17

Please note - this post is pinned to the top of our our blog - for recent updates please check below this post!
We LOVE Skoolbo! It teaches us many literacy and numeracy skills suited to our personal levels. Here is our class leaderboard for the current week.

Login to Skoolbo here   

Visit to the Shirley Library

We walked to the Shirley Library last Tuesday with our friends in Room 18. It was a beautiful sunny afternoon to take a walk. At the library the librarians read us some stories about flight and played some games about flight.
We had a great time and we also want to thank the parents and grandparents who walked with us on our trip.

ASB Getwise

Aimee from ABS came to Learning Hub 17 to teach us about being wise with our money. We played some awesome games identifying money (notes and coins), adding money up and working out the best deals.

We are a Spectacular Class - 50,000 Skoolbo Points!

Congratulations to our awesome Skoolbo learners in Learning Hub 17 who have accumulated 50 000 points! We have received this award from Skoolbo!

Busy writers

Today we practiced writing a procedure. Ms Sullivan showed us how we can write out instructions to make a sandwich, then we wrote our own instructions to make a Marmite and Cheese sandwich. It was tricky for some of us as we had never eaten a sandwich with those ingredients so we really had to think about it.

Term 2 Karakia/Whakatauki and Waiata

Karakia/Whakatauki

Hutia te rito o te harakeke

Kei whea, te komako e ko

Ki mai ki ahau

He aha te mea nui o tenei ao

Maku e ki atu

He tangata, he tangata, he tangata.

When the heart is torn from the flaxbush

Where will the bellbird sing?

You will ask me what is the greatest thing on Earth

My reply is, it is people, it is people, it is people.

Waiata

Whakataka te hau ki te uru

Whakataka te hau ki te tonga

Kia mākinakina ki uta

Kia mātaratara ki tai

E hī ake ana te atākura

He tio, he huka, he hauhu

Tihei Mauri ora

Cease the winds from the west

Cease the winds from the south

Let the breeze blow over the land

Let the breeze blow over the ocean

Let the red-tipped dawn come with a sharpened air.

A touch of frost, a promise of a glorious day

Swimming Fun

Descriptive Sentences

We Are Learning To: use descriptive words to make our sentences have more detail

We started with one thing and kept adding more detail to it. Here are some examples we looked at and discussed.

Here are some of the interesting sentences we came up with during writing this week:

Valentine: The mad bird flew to the sky.
Azayah: The good small bird few away to the hotel fast.
Isileli: The blue bird.
Shaista: The colourful bird.
Althea: The angry bird.
Makayla: The beautiful and colourful bird flew to the beach.
Aaliyah: The happy bird was sleeping on top of a nest.
Keevian: The ginormous eagle in the desert flew far, far away.
Verity: The gentle river flows peacefully and quietly in the forest.
Charlotte: The haunted house got struck by lightening in a storm at night.
Lucas: The super bird eats 1000 worms and feeds little birds the the nest.
Kahlia: The tui bird is flying to the ground.
Kahn: The huge happy city is by the volcano.
Jaydah: The snake slithered and slid until it got tired and lay down and had babies.
Will:  The devil bird was cruel and nasty.
Irmhild: The dolphins are swimming in the ocean happily together at the same time.
Aidan: The colourful cat ate his yummy, yummy food.
Oden: The evil bird killed everything that came next to it.
Harmony: The grumpy blue bird ate seven worms a day in his nest.
Zak: The yellow bird flew to his house.
Molly: The mummy bird had a sleep on the nest.
Carlos: The very fast bird flew across the world to his nest.

Writing to the Queen

We have been learning to: write formal letters in the correct format and write suitable questions.

We decided to write to Her Majesty, the Queen of England to wish her a Happy Birthday and ask her some questions. Mrs Derrick found out that we had to be very polite when we wrote to her and start our letter with either 'Your Majesty' or 'May it please, Your Majesty'. We also had to end the letter very formally too. We thought of some questions we would like to ask her and chose two of them to write in our letters. We hope that the Queen or one of her Ladies in Waiting writes back to us.

Here is us writing our draft letters, our good copy of the letter and  copies of our letters on the classroom wall. We used our H.E.A.R.T value of Excellence while writing our letters in our neatest writing.

Click on the pictures to make them bigger if you want.