Fun with Collage

Today we worked with Team Wha to create these gorgeous collage self-portraits.  Using coloured paper, we covered a piece of white paper with small squares.  Then using a separate piece of paper, we used a vivid to draw ourselves. We cut ourselves out, and glued our self-portrait on top of our collage paper.  Mrs Gempton has put these up on a wall in our classroom and they look fabulous.  Come and check them out...
Here are some photos of us in action...

Goldilocks Poem

Today we illustrated a poem about Goldilocks and the Three Bears.  It is a story that we have been reading and retelling over the last couple of days and now we have a groovy poem to go with it!  Check out these super illustrators :-)

By Jack

By Vintcent

Top Handwriters today!

Miss Ferris was in Team Toru for the day today.  She helped Mrs Gempton to choose 3 top handwriters.  Here is the work she chose!  Well done Tom, Amy and Ali!
We are getting very clever at copying our Handwriting off the board now.  
Ka Pai Team Toru Tamariki!

Measuring Area

Today we had lots of fun measuring the area of leaves.  First we went out with Team Wha and then using cubes, we placed the cubes inside the leaves to see how many cubes we needed to cover the entire leaf.  Team Wha had the biggest leaf - 42 cubes!  What a huge leaf!

Mufti Day

Friday was Mufti Day.  We all donated $2 to support an ex-Mahora School Pupil Aimee Fisher, who is competing in the 2016 Olympic Games in kayaking.  We loved being in our own clothes :-)  Here are a couple of photos of us in our Mufti Day gear, as well as one photo of a group of Team Toru kiddos, creating a building with some fun equipment in our room.

Measuring Magicians!

Team Toru had fun measuring around the classroom today using our crocodile rulers.  We learnt how to write 1/2 and 1/4 and then with a buddy, measured lots of things around the room.  :-)

Fun with Silly Sentences

After finishing our book focus work we can choose some Can Do's around our class at Reading time.  Some silly sentences were made today... we all loved reading these :-)

Thursday's Top Learning

Today we had an awesome day of learning in Team Toru.  It started before school!  Children were busy writing words and numbers on whiteboards before the bell had even rung!  AWESOME LEARNING ATTITUDES TAMARIKI!  We measured our chains today using our bee rulers... we discovered some interesting challenges... what to do when we run out of ruler, how do we measure bits of bees... lots to talk about and learn!  Team Toru have also become awesome silent readers.  We enjoy sitting at our tables reading quietly to ourselves!  Mrs Gempton is so proud of your efforts Team Toru!  What a fantastic start to Term 2!

Mathematical Thinking

We continued our mathematical thinking today... we measured our chains and looked at who had the longest chain and who had the smallest.  We counted the links it took to make our chains... the longest chain had 17 links, but one other chain had 31 links.  Jack and Kalani had made the longest chain and told us that their strategy was to cut long ways and to cut skinny strips of paper to make their chain.
Tomorrow we will be measuring our chains using special bee rulers...

We have also been using dominoes to create number sentences.  Here are some of our sentences for the number 14 -

Welcome back to Term 2!

Team Toru have had an awesome start to Term 2.  We are learning about Eric Carle and have been focusing on the Very Hungry Caterpillar this week.  Come and have a look at our 2 big caterpillars in class!
We are focusing on Measurement for Maths over the next few weeks.  Today, alongside our buddies, we were given a piece of paper to create a paper chain as long as we could.  Tomorrow we will measure these as a class to determine which pair created the longest chain and what strategy they used to achieve this.  I wonder how we will measure the length of these?  I wonder which strategy proves to be the most effective?

As a Hot Spot activity we have been using dominoes to create addition number sentences.  Mrs Gempton has given us a number eg) 15, and we have to take our pack of dominoes away in groups and find dominoes that add to 15 and record these number sentences in our books.  We are starting to get quicker and quicker at this!