We finished our online learning with a dress up and pet sharing

We decided to finish our online learning with a dress up day. What a great assortment of dressups. We had a cow, a cat, a sherriff, a skeleton, a pirate, Ana and Elsa from Frozen, a leopard, a lion, Ariel and a butterfly. Check out the photo of some of our gorgeous characters. It was really fun to dress up.

Check out some of the pets we mwt. They were very well behaved and we enjoyed finding out about them.

Taking photos on our iPad

We had a challenge this week to take photos using our iPads.

We had topics that we could choose to take our photos about.

When we had taken our photos we needed to make a pic collage as this is one of the apps on our iPad. We learnt how to insert pictures and how to insert text and make changes to it. It was great to share our pic collages with each other. We think you will enjoy looking at and reading them too.

Shadow Power

On a lovely West Coast day we were able to experiment with creating our own shadow art. We used our shadow and any other natural materials we could find to enhance our art work. We thought our shadow art looked great and Mrs Scott was really impressed with our creativeness. Awesome work, we nailed it.

Our Laundry Art

There is a Teacher's face book page and on this page there are some fabulous ideas that teachers share with one another. This is where Mrs Scott found the idea of the laundry art. On Friday this was one of the activities that we could choose.

Look at some of the fabulous art work we came up with. What super artists you all were. I loved seeing your creations.

We have loved doing our handwriting at home

Even though we have been doing our learning online we have all really enjoyed continuing with our handwriting at home. We do our handwriting all together in our google meet at 12pm and Ann joins us as well, just like she does when we are at school. We have been reflecting on our work by circling the letter, sound, word or number in each line that we think has been formed the best. When we have been practising, we remember the language that Casey Caterpillar uses to form each letter or sound. On Friday at Assembly we chose to share our handwriting with the school. Ka pai Weka Teina for your great work.

We made a reading hut

Each day we finish our online learning with listening to a story. On Friday we were lucky enough to hear two stories. Our challenge in the morning was to make a reading hut they we could use to listen to the stories in. Our class really enjoyed making our huts to do our listening in. Have a look at the huts we created.

We have been learning how to read time

In math we have been learning hoe to read the time on an analogue clock. An analogue clock is a clock that has hands. We have been learning about the minute hand and the hour hand so that we can read o'clock and half past times. We are learning to read these times so that we will know when it is time to join on our google meets. This is an anogue clock.

To help us practise reading times we made our own clock at home and then we took a photo of our clock showing our favourite o'clock time. Some of us gave reasons why this was our favourite time. Take a look at our clocks. Can you read the time they are showing? Can you spot the half past time?

We have been great helpers at home

As part of our daily online programme this week, one of our tasks was to be a great helper at home. We earnt dojo points for ourselves when we did this. We sent our photos to Mrs Scott and she put them on a slide that we shared each morning to show the different ways we had been helping at home.

Look at all those fantastic helpers. Well done to you all. I'm looking so forward to having you all back in my bubble when we get back to school.

Online Learning has begun for Weka Tēina

What a fantastic start to Online Learning Weka Tēina has made. It was great to see all those beautiful smiling faces online several times a day, each day this week.

We have covered so many different things. We enjoyed using our listening ears to complete a scavenger hunt. Here we are finding something blue.

Listening for and then finding a vegetable.

Great work Weka Tēina. It's great to see that you are using your ears well as part of Whole Body Listening at home.

The Matific competition has begun

Today was the beginning of our Matific competition. Our whole school is taking part in the competition which involves students from New Zealand and Australia. The competition runs for 48 hours, 2 days. We were very excited about beginning today. We are staying focussed and working hard on our math.

Jasper, Maisy and Cooper were busy counting flocks of birds that flew past with their binoculars.

Logan was helping to build a brand new spaceship.

Angus was at the circus with the acrobats.

Emma was counting to see if there were more bees or flowers or the same number of each.

Sienna was on a safari counting the different animals she saw.

We were so busy and engaged and doing some great math thinking. We were able to dress up today too as a Matific monster if we wanted to. Here are some of the students and Mrs King our Principal in their costumes.

Don't they look awesome.

We have a new boat at school

This week we were bubbled out

Our shared big book this week was Bubbles.

We wrote stories about floating in a bubble.

Then we decorated our published stories by blowing bubbles out of water, paint and hand soap and pressing them onto our paper. We were all lucky we knew how to blow through the straw instead of sucking.

We have hung up our bubble stories in the class to share them with others.

We finished off our bubble week by reading our big book together all by ourselves.

Happy Mother's Day to all our wonderful Weka Tēina mums

Happy Mother's Day. I hope all the little Weka's could wait until today to give you the cards they worked so hard on making. They were very proud of themselves.

We also wrote stories for our mum's.

I hope you all have a great day and all have wonderful little 5 year olds that do everything they are asked!!

Weka Tēina loves handwriting

In Weka Tēina handwriting is very enjoyable for all of us. We rotate around 3 different stations each handwriting session. These are handwriting in our books where we use the language of Casey Caterpillar to form our sounds for the week and practise those we have already covered, fine motor skill activities and different letter formation activities. Maisy really enjoyed used the tennis ball to strengthen the muscles in the hand she writes with by making the tennis ball gobble some different sized pom poms.

Here are some photos of us completing our handwriting on Thursday.

Emma, Maisy and Cooper all focussing really well on their handwriting and the formation of the /h/ sound. Casey Caterpillar has taught us that h is formed by a tall stick, tunnel.

Angus and Logan show us their fantastic work.

The yellow highlighter shows us which letter we thought was best on each line. We highlight our own work in yellow on a Tuesday and a Thursday.

Sienna was our 'Handwriter of the day' and her work is proudly displayed. Mrs Scott asked us what we thought about handwriting when we were writing this blog post and this is what we said.... Logan said "I love handwriting." Cooper said "I like handwriting writing and reading letters." Sienna said "I like highlighting my own work and choosing the one I think is best." Maisy said "I like doing the activities at handwriting time." Emma said "I liked using the tennis ball." Angus said "I like writing the Harry hippotamus sound." Well done Weka Teina, you are awesome handwriters.