Heart and Lungs, and Hockey!

The Juniors are learning about the human body this term.  They were fortunate to hive a close look at some hearts and lungs from sheep.  Room 4 went along to have a look also.

We also had a hockey training session with Matthew.

St Mary's Whole School Annual Cross Country

Today we had our cross country at St Mary's.  All the children did their best.  Many students in room 4 have been away sick and some of them are still not 100%, so they did very well to participate.

Congratulations to all the children who participated.

Here are a few photos of our cross country.

Happy smiles from the year 6 girls - even though they felt nervous …

Serious determination from our year 5 boys …

Hockey coaching

In room 4 we have been having some hockey lessons that includes learning some tips and tricks.

Religious Education. The Good Samaritan Parable.

We have been learning from the God Strand. We read the parable of The Good Samaritan and talked about the message in it. To help us understand the events in the story, we acted it out in groups in front of the class.

Here is Sione as the Good Samaritan.

A picture reference we used in class.

Inferencing in reading.

We are learning about inferencing in reading. This is like being a reading detective where we have to use our prior knowledge and clues in the text to understand what the writer is telling us. We used real estate advertising to help us practise this reading strategy.

Toothpick Activity in Maths

We have started learning about area and perimeter in maths. Today we used a rich task to help us understand what area and perimeter mean. Each student used 20 toothpicks to create rectangles of different lengths and widths. We used a table to record the length, width, perimeter and area of each rectangle.

We had lots of "lightbulb moments" when we saw the relationship between length and width to find the area of each rectangle (Area = L x W). Some of us are using the information from our investigation to create a graph.

Koru Themed Art

Today we began art related to the Koru symbol as part of our Maori mini unit study. Students were able to choose how they wanted to integrate the Koru image into their art. Here are some photos of the planning stage. I am looking forward to seeing their art up in our classroom.