Cricket Skills

 Last Monday we learnt some cricket skills. We have two visitors come to school and teach us some skills for cricket. 

First we played tag and we had to run around inside the coned area until we were tagged with the ball. That game certainly got our engines speeding.

Then we learnt the correct way to catch a cricket ball. We learnt to catch the ball by holding our hands together with the palms of our hands facing us and our fingers stretched out. When the ball went into our hands we needed to close our fingers around the ball.  We practised catching the ball in pairs.

Next we had a go by ourselves. We threw the ball up in the air and caught it and then we tried to throw the ball up and clap before we caught it.

Lastly we used the cricket bat to hit the ball and we ran around the wickets before our partner got the ball back to the wickets and called out 'stop'. 

We all really enjoyed learning some new skills, it was fun. At lunchtime some of us even used the cricket gear from the PE shed.  Mrs Scott wonders if any of us will become Black Caps or White Ferns.

We are really enjoying our ukulele lesson on a Friday

 Today was our 2nd ukulele lesson. Mrs Burt joined us today because she really enjoys playing the ukulele too. Naomi did another fantastic job teaching us to play the whole Three Blind Mice song.  We remembered the parts of the ukulele that we had learnt last week and we also didn't need much reminding about getting our fingers in the right place for the 'c' chord. Today was Logan's 1st lesson as he was away last week.

Have a listen to our fantastic playing. 

Sensory - We focussed on our sense of smell

This week at our sensory session we found out about our senses. Joy brought Potato Head along and introduced us to our senses.

We focussed on the sense of smell.  Joy gave us a variety of things to smell. Some of them smelt very pleasant and some were not so pleasant.  We each got to smell them. 

After we had smelt each smell, we used our dial to show how this made our own engine feel.  

The smell that made most of us feel just right was the lavender, orange and the fragrance in the hand cream. We found out that different smells sometimes make our engines run differently and that the same smell doesn't make us feel all the same. The smell that didn't make our engines run well was the chicken poop and mushroom compost. It did however make our learning space smell for quite a long time.

We really enjoyed focussing on our sense of smell. Thanks Joy. 

Our grass heads

We are learning to play the ukulele

On Friday Naomi came to give us our 1st lesson with the ukulele. We learnt how to hold the ukulele and we also learnt about the different parts of the ukulele.

We learnt that we were not allowed to touch the tuning pegs. We found out that a ukulele has 4 strings and we counted the frets on the neck of the ukulele. 

Naomi taught us how to play the 'c' chord and we strummed our ukuleles to the tune of 'Three Blind Mice'.

We really enjoyed our 1st lesson.  Jasper said "I liked the ukulele". Maisy and Emma said "I liked the song." Sienna said "I liked playing it" and Angus said "I thought it was hard because I didn't know."  At the end we talked about what it is like when we try new things and that sometimes it is tricky, but with practise and perseverance it gets easier.

Thank you Naomi, we are looking forward to our next lesson next week.

 

Using breathing to help us with our zones of regulation

 We have been learning about some different breathing when our body engines our beginning to speed up or running too fast. 'Whale breathing' really helps us when we are angry or in the red zone and 'Snake Breathing' can help to slow our engine down when we are in the yellow zone.  

We can go and practise this breathing when we need to now because we have a QR code that we can scan on our iPads.  On Friday we practised using these.  

 

We are going to add some more breathing to our other zones as well. 

When David came to Weka Tēina

 We read the book when 'David Goes to school.'

We made a picture of David and gave him a striped t-shirt just like he was in the book.  Then we thought about what things in our classroom were really important that David would need to know if he was a member of Weka Tēina. We are going to be focussing on each of these things in our class so that we all know what these look like, sound like and feel like. We will share them on our BLOG when we cover each one.

Look at our awesome David's. Well done Weka Tēina, you did a fabulous job.