This term we are learning to write letters. Today we wrote letters to Mrs Paterson to tell her about our holidays.
Emma and Jack are this weeks Bloggers. They will be sharing some of their writing and some of their reflections of things we have done during the week.

These are their letters about the holidays.

Dear Mrs Paterson,

In the holidays I went to Monkey Bay. I touched the seaweed. It was smelly. We went into the cave. We almost touched the water.

From Emma

Dear Mrs Paterson,

In the holidays I went to the Warehouse and I bought a remote control truck. Poppa gave me money because I hung out my Poppa's washing.

From Jack

I hope you are all enjoying your holidays. I can see that lots of you have been viewing our blog. How is the maths challenge going.
We are beginning our cross country training on Monday so I hope you are all ready to get fit.
We have had a bit of a change around in Room 2 so have a careful look on Monday.
I hope you have enjoyed playing your snakes and ladders games over the break. I'm sure you will know lots more words now.

At the end of term 2 we said farewell to six Room 2 children who are moving on to start a wonderful new class, Room 10. We will miss you Jessica, Amelia, Damian, Jasiah, Zach and Robert but you will not be a world away. We will continue to be in touch (just like the children in this picture) and enjoy hearing about all the great things you will be doing with Mrs Craig.

On Tuesday we baked some yummy Instant Pudding biscuits for Grandparents Day. Two groups worked with Mrs Van Der Burg and Natalie and one group made citrus slice with Mrs Paterson.
If you want to have a go at making them in the holidays, here is the recipe.

How to make Instant Pudding Biscuits:

Ingredients:

175 grams butter
1 Cup of Sugar
1 egg
1 packet of instant pudding
1 1⁄2 cups of flour
1 tsp baking powder
3 tbsps cornflour

1. Cream butter and sugar
2. Beat in 1 egg
3. Add 1 packet of instant pudding, 1 1⁄2 cups of flour, 1 tsp BP and 3 tbsp cornflour
4. Roll small balls and flatten lightly with a fork.
5. Bake at 180 for 10mins.

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Friday Night Disco Fever- Junior Style
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Have you looked at our links lately? I have added some more to the maths and literacy links. The maths trainer is a great way to improve your addition and it only takes 5 minutes a day. Why not challenge yourself and see if you can improve your score over the next month.Let me know what your first score is, and at the end of July I will see how much you have improved.There will be a prize for everyone who has a go and improves even just a bit. So give it a go.It will give you something to do during the holidays.

Today we visited Waterlea Resthome with Room 4 as part of our Inquiry. We shared songs, poems and stories with the old people.
We gave them bookmarks that Room 4 had made and read them some of our little books about things we have been learning to do. They really enjoyed our performance and clapped for a long time.
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Today it was Room 2's turn to run the whole school assembly. We decided to show our birdfeeders that we made last term. Because they are hanging in the trees around the school, we had to use our blog to show the school our creations. Mr Parsons asked us to show the new school website. Some of us are in the picture on the homepage. It was taken in room 2 last year.
We were a bit nervous when our parents and brothers and sisters all started to arrive. Then all the classes started to come in and they were all looking at us.
We did a really great job sharing our work and everyone, especially Mrs Paterson,were proud of us.
Emily's father took a video of us. We feel like film stars.

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Player of the Day
by Aramac

I am learning to play rugby.
I scored a try. I was player of the day.
I was happy.

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We did a cool dance when we pretended we were driving a car. Daryan
I liked when he drew the moko on his face with the pencil. Lily
I liked the dancing with the hoops. Blake
I liked when he made a butterfly with the hoops. Emma
I liked pretending to drive a truck. Aramac
I liked the lavalava dancing. Micahla
It was clever when he made a bee with the hoops. Amelia
We did the haka but we said "Humpity Dumpity" Jessica M
I liked the hula hoops. Zach
I liked doing the haka with Bernard. Jessica S
He did break dancing like I do. Jack
I loved it when he did the flower with the hoops. Shannara
He made a horse with the hoops and galloped around. Ruby
I liked the different costumes that he wore. Jasiah
I liked the way the butterfly flew. Emily

Today I went and watched Josh and Emma at their swimming lessons.
Wow Josh, you are really good at floating on your back. You looked so relaxed.
I was impressed with how much your swimming has improved Emma. You were doing a great job with your arm action.
Keep up the good work. Being able to swim is really important. It's another way to keep yourself safe and have fun at the same time.
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Lily was in the paper on Saturday. She told the reporter one of our poems about trees.
This is what the reporter reported in the paper.

Arbor Day June 5

Trees are tall
Trees are green
Trees are the loveliest
things I've seen.

A poem told to me by Lily
from Room 2 Riverlands School. Her Dad
is an Arborist. That's someone whose
job it is to look after trees.

Jasiah won the Player of the Day trophy for his Central rugby team. He put on his yellow thinking hat and told us the good things he did to win his trophy.

I ripped some tags off and scored a try. I get 7 rips.

He put on his red thinking hat to tell us how he felt when the coach said he was Player of the day.

I was happy and excited because I could bring it to school and show my class. Graeme, Olivia and George were watching and they were happy too.

These are the photos that Blake's Dad showed us of the big Fire!
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Mrs Robinson wrote a special poem so we would remember who to ring if there was a fire. It is called "Emergency".We think Mrs Robinson is very clever.

Emergency!

Siren shrieking, loud and clear,
Fire- engine coming, it's nearly here.
Coming to help when a fire starts,
Putting out flames and flying sparks.
When I need help I'll know how it's done.
I'll pick up the phone and dial 111.

This morning Blake's Dad came and talked to us about the big fire at his work earlier this year.
He is the Health and Safety Officer at Flight Timber. We told him what to do if our fire bell rings. He said it is important that visitors and new children at our school know what to do if the fire bell rings and where our safe meeting place is. That is part of his job as Safety Officer.
He showed us amazing photos of the fire. Emily said that her Dad helped at the fire. He is a member of the Rural Fire Brigade.
Thank you for coming and sharing the photos and giving us so much information about what happened.

Robert began school last Friday. His big brother Jamie was in Room 2 when he was 5. Robert used to come into school with him. Now he is 5 and in Room 2.

This is a photo of Emily. She started in Room 2 on Monday. She is holding a photo of her and her Dad that was taken at the Renwick School fair on Fathers Day. Emily is wearing a real fireman's helmet. This photo was in the Midweek newspaper. Wow! You are famous Emily.

This term we are learning to write instructions.
As part of our Firewise topic we have been talking about what to do if we hear the smoke alarm go off at home. We wrote instructions on what to do and then we made a special poster to take home and put on the fridge so all our family know what to do.
Here is what we came up with.
What to do when your smoke alarm goes off at home.

• GET DOWN
  
• GET LOW- below any smoke
• GET OUT- of the nearest safe exit- a window or door
• SHOUT FIRE! FIRE! FIRE! -to let people know there is a fire
• GO TO A SAFE MEETING PLACE-one that your family has chosen away from the fire and near to the road.
• DON'T GO BACK IN! LEAVE IT TO THE FIRE BRIGADE.

We made plans of our houses and talked with our parents about safe exits and where our Safe Meeting Place would be.

We are learning how to get help by ringing 111 and asking for the fire brigade.

It is important that we know our name and address so that we can tell the fire brigade where to go.

Why not take a look at some of our older posts. I have used bubbleshare to make some slideshows of some of the things we have done last term.

On Saturday I went to watch Daryan play soccer. Blake wasn't playing today. Great game Daryan. You looked like you had a lot of fun.You are lucky to have so many of your family supporting you.
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Today Kath Bee came to visit Riverlands School. She is going to write a song especially for our school. She asked us questions to find out what we thought made "Riverlands School Special!"We had lots of ideas. She might use some of them in the song.
Kath wrote one of our favourite songs "Individuality".

" BE FIREWISE" This is a phrase you will hear a lot at home over the next few weeks and will hopefully be something talked about often as a family.
Yesterday we talked about "What is Fire?" and the different kinds of fire ,"Safe" and "Unsafe".
Today we will be talking about the difference between "Tools and Toys".
Look out for this wonderful book in your child's zippit. Just inside the front cover is a note saying which activities to do. Please only do the one marked and return each day.
Turn the booklet over and read the information for Parents.It has lots of very helpful information for you.

Daryan was very excited to share his "Player of the Day" trophy with us yesterday. Daryan plays soccer on Saturdays. Blake's Dad is the coach and Blake plays in the team too. The class enjoys hearing about the things we do outside school.
Playing sport meets lots of our Basic Needs like Fun, Freedom -to make choices, Power-things we do well, and of course Love (all that support and encouragement we get from our family and friends).

Yesterday we welcomed Blake to Room 2. Blake already knows lots of children in our class and we have been using our Connecting Habits by giving Blake Support when he needs help. It is great having you in Room 2 Blake.

Welcome back to Term 2. Over the next three weeks we have Blake, Robert and Emily joining our class. Please make them feel welcome. Show them where things are and help them when they are unsure what to do.
I have added some new maths links. The ones at the bottom are a bit harder. Have a go 1's. Why not challenge mum or dad to a game of "Snakes and Ladders" or just have a game yourself.
Have Fun!

On Saturday I went to watch the Central Under 6 rugby team play. I was surprised to see Fergus playing for Harlequins. Their team was short and Fergus was a really good sport and helped their team out. Well done Fergus. I was lucky enough to see him score a great try.I am looking forward to seeing him in his Central jersey next time and hopefully Jasiah will be there too.
I hope I will get to see all the children who play sport on Saturdays so make sure you let me know where and when you are playing. You too might find your sporting photos on this blog!!KEEP WATCHING!!

Fairybread:
We made bird "Fairybread" with birdseed. Mrs Paterson made us kid " fairybread" We know which one we prefer to eat. We hope the birds like theirs. We hope that over the holidays the birds will find their special feeders and stay in our playground for us all to enjoy watching and listening to.

This is a mushroom birdfeeder. We made holes in the side of the tin for the seed to come out. We put a little dish of nectar ( sugar and water) for the birds that are nectar eaters.

This is a spider bird feeder. We put seed and birdseed fairy bread on it.

This is a house birdfeeder. We made holes in the bottom of the tin for the seed to come out. The birds can sit on the side and eat.

This is a robot birdfeeder. The birds can sit on the arms and peck the seed out through the holes in the bottle.

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We had a very busy day on Thursday designing our bird feeders. Mrs Paterson's daughter, Natalie, helped some groups use kidpix to draw pictures of birds for our "What am I ?" writing while we worked with Mrs Paterson in groups of 4 to create our birdfeeders. We recycled bottles and flower pots (Thanks to Josh and Hadley's Mums for donating these). We all worked hard drilling holes, cutting wire and screwing things together. We took turns at taking photos.

Thank you to all the parents who were able to join us on Friday for our Parents morning tea. We hope you enjoyed our singing and seeing our blog. Wasn't Room 1's play great.Room 3 did a great job of their undersea art (make sure you come in and see ours). Thank you to those who offered to help with PuMP. Remember there is a "Friends of the School" meeting in the staffroom this Tuesday 15 April at 7.30. We really appreciated your support.

Today we had a "Puppets Party". We made party hats for our puppets and on our party hats we put pictures of the puppets. We put them in the order that they came to the party in the story we have been reading. We used words like first, second, third, fourth.
We had 2 party tables with 9 children and puppets on each table. We had to cut up bananas, oranges, plums and muesli bars so that we all got the same amount.
We found out that if we cut 3 things into 6 pieces, we would have a piece each.There were 18 of us at the party and of course our puppets as well.(They didn't eat much though!)
3 lots of 6 makes 18 or 3 x 6 = 18

This is the email we sent to Mrs Paterson's nephew Robbie. He designed special feeding boxes for Kakapo. Asking questions of an expert is one of the ways we can research for our inquiry.He emailed back his answers today. We hope you find the answers to our questions, as interesting as we did.

Dear Robbie,
These are our questions about Kakapo. We hope you can answer some of them for us. Thank you for helping us with our research. We are going to make bird feeders so that birds come to our playground. Our school is helping to establish a new reserve near the river and we are going to find out what plants we should plant to get native birds back into town.

From
Room 2

What do you put in the feeding boxes? Emma
Well Emma, Kakapo normally eat the fruit and seeds that the trees drop so we try to feed them food with lots of energy like apple, kumara, almonds and macadamia nuts.

How and what do the kakapo drink. Micahla
Great question Micahla, they have a bowl on a post that has a lid to stop the other birds from getting in. they put their faceup to it and use their beak to open the door. Then they scoop a beak-full out and slurp it back.


Why did you feed the Kakapo? Jone
Because there are so few Kakapo (91) we try to make sure there is nothing to prevent them from laying eggs. We make sure that they have plenty of food so they when they do lay their eggs they can sit on them for as long as possible without getting up to eat. If they have eaten plenty of food, they don’t need to leave the nest.

How do kakapo get to their feeding boxes? Shannara
Kakapo are very intelligent birds Shannara and when they know an easy food spot, they keep going back to see if there is more. They have a great sense of smell too. Sort of like the treats in the cupboard at home, we can smell and remember where they are!

Where do kakapo hide? Lily
Usually they can be found under logs and in the forks in trees. They have an amazing smell (like musk perfume) and that’s what gives them away.

What do the feeding boxes look like? Joshua
Good question Josh. The boxes are held up off the ground so that the other birds can’t get in. There are two little bowls with lids that hold the food for the birds to eat from. There is also some scales for them to stand on that records how heavy they are.

How do they open the box? Amelia
The Kakapo put their face up to it and use their beak to open the door. Then they scoop a beak-full out and eat it up.


How do they eat the food? Daryan
Kakapo have a really strong (and sharp!) beak so they can bite through tree shoots out in the wild so the nuts and food we give them is no trouble for them to munch through. They use their big feet to hold on to the nuts while they eat just like we use our hands.

Why aren’t there very many Kakapo eggs? Hadley
Great question! Kakapo live for a very long time and they have only a few eggs each year. Often these eggs don’t hatch so they have to wait till the next year – this means that they don’t have many chicks each year.

How do the tags work? Jack
The tags are really similar to a cellphone. When you are trying to find the birds, you turn on a hand held tool that beeps more the closer you get to the kakapo.

How do they stop other animals getting into the boxes? Jessica M
The lids are locked until the right animal arrives at the hopper. When the right bird is on the scales, the lock releases and lets the Kakapo in.

How do you stop the animals killing the kakapo? Amelia
We have put all the Kakapo on islands that have no animals that could kill them. New Zealand has lots of small islands dotted around its coasts and if we remove the stoats, rats, possums and cats, the Kakapo can live happily

Do any other bird have feeding boxes like the kakapo? Ruby
Yes, we have made feeding boxes for some other birds Ruby. We have made one for Takahe and its pretty easy to make them for tui and bellbirds. These birds really like to eat sweet water so if you add a few spoons of sugar to warm water and stir it, you’ll have birds in no time!

Today we had Dance and Drama with Mrs Leov in the Opawa Room.

I liked when we did dancing with the fish under sea. Lily
We pretended we were under a net. Jasiah
We went under Mrs Leovs red net and black net which were just like real nets. Emma
I liked being under the nets as well. Ruby.
We pretended we were being crabs. Daryan
We liked being different kinds of fish. Amelia
I liked being a fish swimming around in the water. Fergus
I liked walking like a penguin. Jone
I liked doing star fishes. Hadley
We were read two stories about at the seaside. Josh
We had heaps of cool music. Jack
We had all different kinds of music. Jessica S

We are excited about what we will do next time. Thanks Mrs Leov.

Today our big buddies came and shared some bird books with us. They asked us lots of questions as they went. Then we used a programme called comic life to share all we had learnt. We chose which kind of page layout we liked and then we chose photos of our birds from the photo library. We dragged them into place until we were happy with how they looked. Then we told Mrs Paterson and Mrs van de Burg some things we knew about our bird and they added it to our pictures. We shared our work with the class with the data projector.

This morning we went to our school garden with Mrs Hepburn. She showed us tomatoes, carrots, potatoes, pumpkin, parsnip, red cabbage, lettuce and other salad greens and radishes. We got to taste some of it. Mrs Hepburn thought we were very clever because we knew lots about vegetables ,especially Jack. She might let us do some gardening this year.

Today we went to Room 1 to have Music with Mrs Robinson.

We listened to see what we could hear in the music. We could hear bumble bees, and trolls and swan music. Emma

We heard the trees make noise. The leaves were making making noises too. Daryan

I liked to step on the leaves and they were crunchy. Jone

We played a game. We had a ball. Someone goes into the cloakroom and when come back they have to find the ball. When they get close we had to clap louder. When they weren't close we clapped quietly. Shannara, Jack, Jessica M

We had to clap very loud and stamp our feet when they were there. Fergus

We were animals when the music was playing. Jasiah

The music was the carnival of the animals. Josh

Jack brought his dad's didgeridoo to school. He is very good at making music with it. It is really hard as you have to blow really hard and move your tongue.Some of our class have tried and they couldn't even make a sound.

This is the powerpoint we made with our photos after our Crunch and Munch show. We added our voices to the slideshow but they haven't come out on our blog.Oops! We can read the story to you.

We made little bunny baskets for our bunny biscuit and our decorated eggs.When we shook our eggs they made a noise.We wonder what might be inside.Maybe Easter Bunny has been to visit. We ate our little biscuits. They were YUMMY!!Happy Easter

We made these delicious bunny biscuits for easter.We made big bunnies as well and put pink icing and chocolate pebbles for the eyes and nose.We made enough little bunnies for all the children in Room 1 and they put on their bunny ears and tails and came and sang "Mrs Bunny" to say thank you.

We made sketches of our head and shoulders. Mrs Paterson made them bigger on the photocopier.
We used water colour paints to paint our faces first. Then when it was dry we painted our clothes, hair and finally we painted the background using warm and cool colours. We are very proud of our paintings. What do you think?
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Practice your alphabet with this powerpoint. Click on the letter and then the arrow below. Say each letter as you do it. Good Luck

Mrs Paterson brought some lovely red apples to school. We talked about how they looked, felt, sounded and tasted.
We thought of lots of great Describing words.
Come in and look at what we wrote. We are going to make our work into a big book.

Today we went to the "Crunch and Munch" show. We learnt about eating all the food colours to keep us healthy, strong and to give us energy!
We had lots of fun helping tell the story and singing the "Crunch and Munch" song.

I was worried about floating but I liked going
round and round. Fergus
I was relaxed when I floated on my back. Joshua
I was excited when I floated by myself. Jone

This morning we put on our red thinking hat and talked about how we felt when we got to the stadium yesterday. We used words like nervous, scared, excited,worried, happy, frightened.

When we looked at the photos we realised that if we "have a go" like our poem and big book told us, we would feel better about things.

Have a go!

Listen,
Look,
and have a go!
That's how you learn,
said Mr Know.

Today was our first day of Fundamental Skills at Stadium 2000. After a warm up we lined up in our teams ready to go to our first rotation. We had swimming lessons, Water Safety, Circuit Training, Dodgeball, Indoor hockey and basketball. At lunchtime we all sat together and talked about all the cool things we had done before going on to our next 3 rotations. Our teachers think we will sleep well tonight. They certainly will!!

We have been learning about what we need to be Happy.We found out that we need Love, Freedom ( making our own choices), Power (knowing that we are important and that we are all good at something) and Fun.

We made spiders after hearing stories about Ananse. He was wise and clever. We are clever too. We added one of the things we were good at to our spiders.They are hanging from a web that appeared in our classroom one morning.

Last week we had an African storyteller come to school. He told us a story about Ananse the spider who was very wise. After the show Sam came to visit Rooms 1 & 2 and he told us a story about how the leopard got his spots.

Welcome to 2008. Our blog has been having a rest and is now ready to get up and running to tell you all about the wonderful things we do in Room 2 at Riverlands School.