Sunday 25 June 2017

Weeks 6, 7 and 8, Term 2

Immersion

We have changed our timetable this term and currently have immersion workshops four mornings a week.  Over the past three weeks we have had some exciting experiences focussed on our concept of energy.

Scales, Feathers and Fur

For weeks 6 and 7 our focus was the living world of science. We were lucky enough to have living eggs in our learning common! Throughout this context our key questions were:

Do animals have energy?
How do animals get energy?
How do animals use or save their energy?

For this context, our writing was fully integrated to make it as authentic as possible.  Some of us focussed on writing full information reports and others linking emergent writing to the context where possible. 




We have also been linking our priority learning to our immersion context to make the learning authentic.  On our maths table we have been sorting animals and creating venn diagrams.  In art we have looked at different animal patterns and creating our own animals. 





PINS

PINS has been a great success over the past few week.  Ranging from visiting dogs and guinea pigs to learning about Matariki.  The children have had a range of hands on experiences working with a variety of people.  It has been wonderful to see some of our younger children and others that find leading challenging taking on a leadership role and running their own workshops too. 













Maths

In target maths workshops we have been working on the concept of doubling and halving.  Firstly some groups looked at doubling numbers.  We used the 'Doubles Rap' to help us!  You can try it at home too...


We are now working on recognising halves and quarters of shapes and some children are working on finding halves and quarters of sets. 

PE

Four mornings a week we start our day with PE.  This term we have focussed on large ball skills. We have PE in our guardian groups and learn a large ball sport for 6 workshops before changing over.  By the end of the term all children will have had football (soccer), basketball, netball and rugby workshops. We have found it a really successful way to start the day and the children have too!



Sunday 4 June 2017

Week 5, Term2

Immersion


Energy

This week we continued our immersion learning and have come to a finish of the two week immersion of 'Whizz, Bang, Pop!' (The material world of science).

Our Essential Questions were:

What is energy?
Can energy run out?
How is energy important in the everyday lives of people?

Key vocabulary:
Energy, reaction, change, liquid, solid, gas, absorb, hypothesis (predict), 
experiment, results.


Bang, Crackle and Pop!

Before we began this context, we asked the children 'What is a Reaction?' and recorded our thinking on hexagons. We then grouped our thinking. Now that we have come to the end of this context we revisited the hexagon. We asked the same question and reflected on our learning journey. We have recorded them on our learning journey wall.  









PINS

We have been having great sessions for our PINS! Thank you to all the parents who support our children during PINS. 





Explore

Our new whiteboard table has arrived! Children have been exploring with the whiteboard table and practising their alphabets, shapes, lines and their names. 



What a great week of learning and fun!