Assembly

Last week we had our assembly with our big buddies, Adventure 9. We shared some writing and our Mexican Hat Dance! Check us our below:

Broadcast live streaming video on Ustream

Kelly Club

On Wednesday we had some fun with Kelly Club! We played superheros vs. supervillians, made finger puppets and some scrumptious truffles. Check out our fantastic recount writing:

Here is a clip of us in action! 

Superhero Dad Writing

In our writing we have started to use Tony Ryan’s thinking keys to help us unlock our minds. Last week, we used the book “My Dad, My Hero” for inspiration and the BAR (Bigger, Add, Replace) key to help us re-design our superhero dads.

We came up with some amazing stories, which isn’t surprising since we are superhero learners! 

Vanessa was also impressed that Clara, Matty, Jacob, Eshaan and Benjamin created their own thinking key when playing our cups game during reading.

This is my Story, What is you Story?

A huge thank you to Jack’s mum Danielle for coming to teach us all about China! Danielle was born in China and came over here when she was in her early twenties. She shared lots of facts and stories from China. She even bought us some flakes and Chinese rice cakes for us to try! The Busy Bees are now fascinated by all things Chinese! When we reflected on our learning as a class this is what we came up with:

- The great wall of china is GIGANTIC!  It is about 8,000 kms long. Vanessa worked out this was the same distance as going from Palmerston North to Auckland and back 8 times!!

- Chinese dragons. They wear fire around them to protect them and they long tails for flying. We thought this was not only cool, but super cool!

- Chinese food: Rice cakes and flakes. We all loved the flakes! They tasted like lollies but they were healthy. With the rice cakes our favourite flavour was the peanut butter. We liked the red bean flavour the least.

- The primary school we looked at had 3,000 students! There were 60 children in the class (three times for kids than the Busy Bees!) and they sat in rows of desks to do their learning.

Busy Bee Bowling

We love our new busy bee bowling maths game! These skittles have numbers on the bottom and we can use them to help us learn our maths in lots of different ways. We can add up the numbers we knock over, double the numbers on the bottom of the pins we knock over and some groups can even use them for multiplication! It’s so much fun to play and we notice the more we play, the more we knock over so it’s improving our aim too.

Rocking on with our reading!

We have started to do a “must do” and “can do” in our reading. This lets gives us some choice in the activities we want to do. It’s easy to choose things we love to do, but we also think about what will be best for our learning goals, with some coaching from Vanessa.

So, if our goal is to get better at our handwriting, we might choose write the room instead of magnetic letters so we can practice.

Look at what fantastic independent learners we are during reading time:

Buddy Reading

Every day after brunch, we read independently from our browsing boxes with our reading groups. Once a week, we have started to share our favourite story with someone else who isn’t in our group. We can read our favourite page, share our favourite picture and talk about what happened in the story. This helps us to be better readers because we can better understand the things that happen in stories we read. 

Ka Pai Busy Bees! I love what thirsty learners you are! This is why you are such superstar readers!!