Norwood Tractor Visit 14/08/18

On Tuesday afternoon the CEO of Norwood Tractors came to visit YMS, giving us an opportunity to welcome him to our school and say thank you in person to he and the Norwood Tractor staff for their generous sponsorship of our carb break initiative.  Our Kapa Haka group, with the Matua's help, led the school in formally welcoming them the visitors to our school.

The visitors then toured our classrooms and spoke with us about our learning.  This week as part of our Maths Week activities we have been using our maths knowledge to draw up our own plans of what we would like in the new school garden.  Our visitors were very interested in our plans when they were in our class and asked us lots of questions.  Their company is going to be providing some help with getting the new garden area outside the Te Māhuri block underway.  We were glad to be able to share our ideas with them. 

We finished off our lesson by sharing our ideas with each other and looking for the most popular suggestions of what to plant in our new garden.  These ideas have now been shared with the rest of the school as part of our 'student voice' in the design process of the garden.

Term 3 Week 3 - Setting up our Science Experiment

On Friday we completed the next step of our science experiment.  To make growing wheat seeds into an experiment we needed to first think about what we knew about the things plants need to grow healthy and strong.

We worked with our talking buddies and then shared back to the class and made this list of the things we think plants need to grow best:
* Sunshine
* Water
* Soil
* Caring
* Worms

From this list we decided the main thing we could change about how the wheat seeds could be grown in our classroom environment was the soil.  So we will be experimenting to see what type of soil the wheat seedlings will grow best in.

Each group has 2 seedlings growing in sand, 2 seedlings growing in normal garden soil (from the current school garden) and 2 seedlings growing in a potting mix.  We will be looking to see if the type of soil makes a difference to how big and strong the wheat seeds grow.  We put the other pots in a box on top of the cubbies to also see if less light will make a difference to how big and strong our wheat seeds grow.

Link to Experiment Slides

  

Term 3 Week 2 - Sprouting Success!

Our wheat seeds have been so well cared for by TM1 and are obviously in a great place for growing.  We have lots of seeds germinate and some are getting pretty tall.  Please come and visit the class and see for yourself!

Our next step for our experiment is to record some observations about what we have noticed and then plant some of the seedlings up begin our experiment.

Term 3 Week 1 - Science!!

We have all been very excited this week with the first science experiment for our Term 3 Inquiry.  Greta's family have provided us with some wheat seeds so that we can grow wheat in class just like Greta did earlier in the year.  Thank you very much to the Stuart family for helping all our learning!

Our first stage of our experiment was to get the seeds germinating.  We brainstormed and planned what equipment we would need for the experiment on Tuesday afternoon. 

On Friday morning we started the seeds off using egg cartons and cotton wool.  We are in groups for the experiment and are in charge of looking after our own group's seeds (checking if they need water).  Each group has agreed a schedule of who will check the seeds each day and look after them.  

Our seeds are on the two desks near the sink in front of the window.  This side of the class gets the sunshine in the afternoons, so hopefully it will be a great place to grow seeds.  When you visit our class please come and see how they are going for yourself and ask us questions, we are keen to share our learning with you. 

We will keep you updated of how the experiment is going throughout the term.

Writing Term 2 Week 10

This week in writing we finished off the descriptive writing we have been focusing on this term with a fun activity describing items in jars using our senses.  The items in the jars were wool, pebbles, oats, crystals and playdoh.

We made notes on what the items looked like, felt like, smelled like and sounded like as we moved round each station.  We then shared our ideas with the class and wrote descriptions of the different items in the jar.

At the end we tried to guess what the crystals were.  A lot of us thought washing powder, but actually they were radox crystals!

Here are a few of our descriptions:

'The crystals sound like rattling sand' Levi
'It feels like hair [the wool]' Max
'The wool looks like a fluffy cloud' Laura
'The pebbles sounds like...gun shots and fireworks' Seidyn
'The pebbles feel smooth and hard' Renzil
'The Crystals sound like crackling rice bubbles' Alice

T2W6 Corey Baker Visit

On Thursday Corey Baker came to visit YMS to share his Antarctic Dance with Te Māhuri 1 and 2.  Corey used to be a student at YMS when he was younger.  He enjoyed looking around a bit and seeing how the school had changed since he was last here. 

We learned about the dance he created in Antarctica and what it was like to be in such a cold place.  It was amazing just how many layers of clothes Corey needed to wear each day and we really enjoyed the chance to try them on.  Everyone found it funny to learn about why the fur is on the outside of the gloves they wear there!  He talked with us about the message behind us dance - climate change and its impact on the Antarctic.

Corey lead us through some dance activities in the Whare Hui and we got to watch a recording of his dance with him.

Making ourselves into an iceberg

Trying out Corey's Antarctic clothing

Talking about Climate Change

Spellbound watching the dancing

T2W5 Loopy

This week we have been learning a new maths game to practice our addition basic facts.  Loopy is a new maths game to most of us in TM1 that can be used to practice many different sorts of maths skills - addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and geometry to name a few.  Please ask us about how the game works.

Once we get a little more familiar with playing this we will start to time our round and add the element of 'beat the clock' to our games.

T2W2 - Kelly Sports

This term we will be having a PE lesson on Tuesday afternoons run by Steve from Kelly Sports.  We will be focussing on developing skills we will need for playing sports games, such as attacking, defending and working as a team. 

In this first lesson our warm up games included one with bean bags where we needed to throw to a partner five times and then the person who ended up with the bean bag needed to move off and find another partner to throw with.  After a few tries and some different ideas we learned that it was so much easier to find a new partner if the people who were free put their hands up or called out - we could quickly move to a new partner once we knew who was free!

Easter Fun Afternoon - Hat Making in Te Māhuri

Te Māhuri threw themselves into hat making on Thursday for the Easter Fun Afternoon.  In Te Māhuri 1 we were fortunate enough to have Rebecca helping us out making hat bands for us.  Thank you Rebecca - your quick work making and fitting people's hat bands was such a help getting us ready in time for the hat parade!

We were really impressed with the amount of sharing, co-operating and encouragement we saw as everyone worked hard and fast to create all the wonderfully creative hats and accessories you can see in the pictures below. 

T1W8 - Get Writing New Zealand!

For the last couple of weeks Te Māhuri has been taking part in an exciting writing programme with other schools from all over New Zealand.  We have been given buddy schools and have been working on a set of postcards to send to each other.  The Weka and Kiwi writing groups have been working with Mrs Hancock and have a buddy school up in Hamilton.

On our postcards we are writing a metaphor about ourselves to share with our buddy class.  In our writing lessons we have been learning about metaphors - describing ourselves (or other things) by comparing ourselves to something else.  When we explored our playground we came up with some great metaphors about what we saw:
The sky is a big blue blanket over the top of us
The trees are a line of soldiers standing straight and tall 

We noticed that our postcards all had part of a picture on the other side.  After we finished writing our metaphor on our postcards, we spent some time solve the puzzle of what picture the postcards made.  Worryingly, we found that our number 19 postcard was missing!  We hunted high and low to try and find the missing postcard, but with no luck.  Thankfully, a couple of days later we found the postcard, and so we have a full set to send to our buddy after Easter.

Our almost completed puzzle - missing postcard no. 19!

T1W6 - The Circus came to School

Te Māhuri was so excited when people from the circus came to visit us on Thursday after lunch.  We could hardly wait until it was time to find our places out on the netball court so that the show could begin.  The show was a small taster of some of the acts we would be able to see at the Weber Bros Circus.  We learned some interesting facts about the acts at the circus, such as our Ringmaster being from South Africa and the funny clown being from Mexico.  At the end there was a chance to win tickets to the show for those that remembered all the interesting facts from the show ... Casey from Te Māhuri used his amazing memory powers to win a ticket - ka pai, well done!

Softball T1W5

In our softball lesson this week we played some fun games to help us learn all the names of the positions for the fielders on the softball field.  First Base, Centre Field and Short Stop are just a few of the new names we learned.  We tried our best to remember them all and find where they are on the field.  We also continued to practice throwing and catching with the big softball gloves.

Healthy Individual T1

We thought we would share our work in TM2 today as we're pretty proud of it! We were learning about how we can be Healthy Individuals while eating. We talked about some life hacks for food and watched a great video to give us some ideas, then we came up with our own. Have a look at our slides that we have created and shared below!

Robin Hood Show

We had a great time watching the show Robin Hood yesterday. We had the Hagley Players theatre group to perform and we were very lucky because it was very funny. We had to go in two groups and watched and listened to the actors. 





We asked lots of questions about how the costumes were made and how long the set took to build. Did you know it only took them a couple of days but it was all hand painted? Wow!

Thank you Hagley Players!

Swimming Sports

What a busy day Monday was! We all had swimming sports on Monday afternoon and we were very lucky to have both year levels done before the sun disappeared!

We had lots of races in the Year 4-8 session as well as some star swimmers who came first doing whole lengths! Some of us were a bit nervous but everyone did so well. We are all very proud of ourselves. 

The Year 1-3 session gave lots of great demonstrations of all the great things we have learned to do in the pool. We saw some people walking from one side to the other, some people using a noodle to help them float and even some superstars who were trying to swim with their float board.

Everyone gave it their best and celebrated our achievement and effort. Well done everyone!

Safety Truck Visit

Today we had the safety truck visit us. We got to learn about all the things that are important to keep ourselves safe on and off the road with trucks nearby :)

The truck was parked up on the field and we got to go in the cab and in the trailer so we could learn. We also got to have a turn blowing the horn. It was so loud!

Lots of us came back with truck magazines and we really enjoyed it.

Thank you for coming, Safety Truck!

Welcome back to YMS!

Welcome back! We hope you have had a great summer break and have enjoyed the pool weather!

We're rocking right back in and are enjoying swimming and joining up to learn how we can continue to be YMS Heros in 2018.

We've had a great start to the week hearing about holiday trips, play dates with friends and learning our new routines!

Remember to get your sunhats and sunblock ready, along with your togs for swimming lessons with our SwimSafe Tutors next week!