World Kindness Day

Last Tuesday was World Kindness Day!

We spent some of the day filling out kindness cards and delivering them around the school. We wanted to tell people (our friends, family, teachers) why they make the world a better place. It made us feel special and happy when we got delivered a card.

Check out some of Miss Johnstone's.

We delivered lots to Penny and Mr Wilkinson. We made their day so they made ours by delivering something to us in return... iceblocks! Yum! What an amazing day. It's so cool to be kind!

Happy faces!

Our Names

Last week for Writing we researched our own names. We wanted to find out which country they originated in, what they mean, and why our parents chose them for us. We took home some questions for our parents. They were able to tell us the story behind our names and what we would have been called if we were the opposite gender.
It is such an important job coming up with the perfect name. We loved reading and sharing all of the special stories behind our own. For example, Kian was named after a member of a boyband called Westlife, Addison was named after a character on Grey's Anatomy, Courtney's middle name is Leigh after her amazing aunty, if Brodie was a girl he would've been named Maddison so him and Addison would be Addison and Maddison!

Some pretty cool stories.
Check some out:

All others are on the wall in Ngakaunui. Come have a look!

Mack Comes To School

We had a special guest today.. Mr Mack Templeton! (and his mum)

Mrs Templeton brought in Mack so that we could finally meet him. What a cute baby! He's now 5 months old and looking more and more like his big brother Beau. We had a fun morning passing him around, Mack loved the attention and was super chilled.

Making The Most Of This Weather!

Wow! What beautiful weather we have been having lately. One afternoon we decided to make the most of this by taking our Duffy Books outside and reading under the trees.

Look at those independent readers!

It was interesting to see the girls in our class doing this so silently and independently, and the boys all sat in a circle and listened to me read a story for them. It was a beautiful way to end the day, and something we will do more often as the weather gets better and better heading into Summer.

A Day on the Slopes

We went Skiing!

What a great day some of us had up Mt Hutt. It was beautiful weather and even better company. A big bunch of us took to the slopes on Wednesday. We had a ball. The students did a great job, and for some it was their first time seeing snow. We all had a go on the magic carpet, some of us even went up the chairlift with Mr Boyd..super brave!
Bring on next years trip.

Looking good Ms Raisin

Excited for the day ahead of us.

Stunner of a day

Nalanee was a natural

Miss Johnstone and Ms Raisin showing the students how it's done

Random Acts of Kindness Week

Our resource

A couple of weeks ago we had Random Acts of Kindness Week at our school. Each day we focused on Making Someone's Day- our school value. Mr Wilkinson even got involved, and organised a coffee cart for parents in the morning. On Friday we had a whole day of this. We had a letterbox set up on the field and we all had to write letters for people around the school. These then got delivered in the afternoon!

Collecting the letters up to deliver

So many letters!

We then decided we wanted to Make People's Day in our community. On Friday afternoon we wrote notes for our neighbours- they said things like "You have a nice garden" "I hope this makes you smile". We wandered around the streets and put these notes in peoples letterboxes. The next week, a lady replied and said we had made her day... a great feeling!

Lovely notes ready to be delivered to letterboxes around our school.

What students said about RAOK Week:

"I liked it when people did nice things for me such as holding the door opened for me."- Benaiah

"I liked it when students were nicer to be than usual."- Lachlan

"Random Acts of Kindness Week was fun because we got to do nice things for everybody and that made me feel good!" - Shyla

"When I got a reply from the note I put in someone's letterbox I felt happy because I liked that someone appreciated what I wrote." - Mikayla

Ngakaunui Personality Traits

Today in Kiwi Can we were looking at personality traits. 

We are all different. Katie and Owen did an activity with us where they asked a question, and we had to go to different corners of the room to show what our answer would be. At the end of the activity, we added up our letters (either L, O, B, or G) and whatever letter we had most of related to an animal which we were most like. 

L= Lion

O= Otter

B= Beaver

G= Golden Retriever

Back in class we researched the personality traits for each animal, and we reckon they really summed us up! We have a lot of Golden Retrievers in Ngakaunui- which is lucky because they are pretty cute! Check out our personality traits below.

We have been learning.... symmetry!

For Numeracy in Ngakaunui we are beginning to look at symmetry. First we looked at some images and had to decide whether or not they were symmetrical or asymmetrical. We then found our own images and made a google drawing to show these.

Benaiahs Google Drawing to show symmetry. You can find more on our individual blogs.

Miss Johnstone gave us each a popsicle stick with a design on it, we had 20 seconds to find the popsicle stick that was symmetrical to ours. This was then our buddy for the next activity. We had to look at shapes on Google Drawing and decide how many lines of symmetry they had. What shape had the most? What shape had the least?

Courtney and Lexi's image to show different lines of symmetry.

The next task was to create symmetrical name masterpieces! We had to write our name nice and big on one half of a folded piece of paper. We then learnt the rubbing technique and this imprinted our name on the other half. We vivided over our names, and then decorated it and they ended up looking a bit like bugs. We had to use colour to make our names symmetrical and like a mirror image. Check them out below.

Fairy tales

We are a pretty arty bunch in Ngakaunui and enjoy being creative. For the last two weeks in literacy we have been looking at Fairy tales. Miss Johnstone was extremely surprised that we hadn't heard of a lot of them so we spent some time reading and finding out what our favourite one was. In groups, we rewrote a fairy tale, changed parts to make improvements, and illustrated our pages. We are now in the process of turning these pages into a book. we have retold Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Puss in Boots, The Ugly Duckling and more!

We have loved retelling these stories and reading fairy tales so much that we decided to create some fairytale artworks. These were originally supposed to be based off our favourite fairytale characters but we got a bit carried away and as soon as we mentioned Harry Potter Miss Johnstone said we could choose any book characters as well!

We found an image of the character that we wanted to turn ourselves into, and then Miss Johnstone took photos of us posing like them. The photos were printed off and we used pastel to completely colour over it and turn ourselves into the characters. They look pretty amazing and Mr Wilkinson is even going to put a display up in his office.

Ngakaunui's favourite book characters

Matariki Masterpieces

We have been learning about Matariki in class. For reading, we are doing research on elements of Matariki and why we celebrate it. We are creating our own learning based off different readings and videos that we have watched. This is the resource that we are using for our learning.

Matariki

Ngakaunui have also been talking about setting goals, aspirations, or wishes for the Maori new year as this is recognised at Matariki. Here are some of the artworks we have completed to display these. More will be uploaded as they are completed...

Fun times at Kiwi Can

Today in Kiwi Can we talked about conflict and resolution. We played Miss Johnstone's favourite game where you get given a name of a person or a thing and you need to ask questions to solve who you've got. We held these to our foreheads and talked about the difference of open and closed questions. Some of these were pretty funny!

An orange, Beyonce, and Mickey Mouse

Hamburger, Santa Claus and a sheep!

Meet Taylor Swift and Sleeping Beauty

When Miss Johnstone's Brother Came To School...

Miss Johnstone's little brother came to school yesterday with a special treat.. his truck! We have been talking about roles and responsibilities within the community. We learned a lot about what truck drivers do and how important they are.

Leadership with Owen and Katie

For the last couple of leadership lessons we have been learning different aspects of leadership. We have been talking about encouragement and helping others. Last week we played a game called Minefield where we had to navigate the whole class through a route of hoops. Owen had a map drawn out on a piece of paper which was a secret! It was a game of trial and error but we made it in the end and it was nice to see the whole classes encouragement and support of others.
This week we were split into two teams and we got given 3 hoops. We pretended we were crossing a river. We supported each other to get across the river, if we fell out of the hoop we had to go back to the beginning. Katie then made it harder for us by replacing a hoop with a tote tray! There was a lot of falling out and a few injuries but it was very impressive to see the perseverance with a tough task. We didn't think the students could do it but they proved us wrong!!
Here's a few pics of the last few weeks of Kiwi Can:

Katie and Owen and their little helper Connor!

Making our way across the river...it's a race!

Holding onto each other tight so we don't fall out!

Our topic...Community!

We are looking at "Community" as our topic for the rest of the year. We began our topic by asking what is a community? We looked at a few pictures and had a class discussion to determine whether or not is was a community. We had some funny pictures in there that generated good justifications! This is what we thought were community vs non-community.

We weren't sure about the pictures in the middle, but the rest we thought were a community!

We stood in a line to show our knowledge of community. Some weren't too sure so stood right down the end towards the window- we spread ourselves along the continuum according to where we thought we were on a scale of not a lot of knowledge about communities- to expert! We will try this again at the end of the term, hopefully we've all moved along a little bit!

Our class continuum!

We have recently been working on a shared slide. Each of us chose a different "community" to display on a google drawing. Some of us choose communities of animals, our families, sports teams etc. Check them out on the slide below!

We are now breaking down the concept of community in terms of 'roles and responsibilies' first we are looking at the different roles in our families. Stay tuned to see some of these!

Kiwi Can Debates

In Kiwi Can we have been learning to listen to each other. We talked about the fact that often at times, we may have a different opinion to someone else. This doesn't matter though, we can still be friends even if we think differently. Katie gave the example that Owen's favourite pizza flavour may be pepperoni. If Katie's favourite is Hawaiian and hates pepperoni does that mean they can't be friends? No, they just might not go out for pizza together!
In life there is often times when people have different opinions to us. To illustrate this we did a debate. We got into teams of 3, and had to argue different moots. One team's moot was McDonald's was the best food ever. We had to argue for and against this. It was a pretty fun task and Owen was our judge. We had a blast!

Our Debate Set Up

Having a discussion about opinions.

Happy Mother's Day!

Happy Mother's Day to all the amazing Gilby Mum's! We hope you enjoyed the writing that we have been working extra hard on this week.

May the fourth be with you...

We had a fun day at Gilby on Friday. It was Star Wars Day! What a great reason to have a muft day. Kids, and teachers dressed up in either their favourite Star Wars or Superhero costume! These made for some great snaps. What a cool day.

The Gilby staff love a dress up day.

Superman and Superwoman!

A pretty cool looking Princess Leia!! Suits you Miss Waho.

Strand Math- Measurement

In week one, Ngakaunui spent the week focusing on Measurement for Numeracy. We learnt how to measure in cm and mm. We even made our own cm rulers to help us. We made a list together of things that we would like to measure. First up, we measured our hands. We found out that Courtney has the biggest hands, and Logan has the smallest.

We put our hands in order from small to big

We decided to see if this was the same with Ngakaunui feet... it was not!

We then decided to measure other parts of ourselves. We created a slide, using our cm rulers we measured our arms, face, eyes and smile! Check these slides out on our blog.

Zantae using Te Mihaea's ruler to measure his face.