Mathsbuddy

The students at St Mary's school in years 4-8 have access to a maths site called Mathsbuddy.

Each student in room 4 has been given a username and password.
We have free access to this site until the end of the year.

I would strongly recommend students take advantage of this opportunity.

Here is some information about Mathsbuddy from their website:

Benefits of Maths Buddy 

Gives student the freedom to study without stress, at home, in their own time, at
their own pace.
Students can catch up on lessons they missed or concepts they have not fully
understood.
Because maths concepts build upon each other, sometimes it's necessary for students

to go back and revise a particular concept before moving on to a new topic, 

this can be done as every student has access to the entire Year 1 to 13 program curriculum.
Students can preview lessons at home before they take them at school.
Students can gain understanding and confidence especially in areas where they 

struggled previously.
Students can complete the worksheets and interactive questions to test their understanding. 

All of their results are recorded so that their progress can easily be seen.

Take the time to explore the resource yourself

We recommend that all parents take the time to explore the site, and familiarise
themselves with the student/tutorial interface by trying our free lessons.
This may well be your best spent 30 minutes in support of your child’s mathematics future.

Go to: www.mathsbuddy.co.nz

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.