Week 6 Term 1

Thank you all for your understanding and support over the past two weeks.  I believe everyone swam well at the swimming sports - well done. Both Mason and Jack S also had BMX trophies to show me when I called at school on Wednesday - Congratulations boys.
Last week spelling came home in homework books which I tested on Friday. Your child's results are recorded beside their lists. We will spend this week in class time learning how to conduct and tool the lists that come home in books. The spelling lists that I send home are to practise the skills of "saying, tooling and recording" the sounds in order, in the words of the list. They are not words that need to just be learned by heart.  Spelling Alive is about learning skills and then using these skills and knowledge to be able to spell unknown words. The focus at the top of the spelling sheet will be the class learning focus which at present is hearing and recording clean sounds in Plan One words, (words that are spelled using one sound = one letter).  It will say 'decodable'. We are also working on being able to articulate and hear the vowel sounds in words, at times these are really tricky.
Now that all the swimming is over, we will begin to look at our Inquiry for the term. The Big Idea is that "events from the past have a huge impact on today and the future. We need to remember them and celebrate what they gave us. Commemoration".  Our class focus will be about "Me and My Family". We have started by drawing some fantastic portraits of ourselves, and measuring ourselves. Next we will begin to find out all we can about our families. We will be sorting questions to ask at home or of our relatives and eventually may find out whether any of our great grandparents or great, great grandparents went to either of the wars, as we look at the meaning of Anzac Day and the 100 year commemoration. Along the way I'm sure that we will find out lots about our local community and what it was like here in the past.
I have checked all the homework books that were at school on Friday.  Please be sure that homework books are at school on Fridays and that poetry books come back to school on a Monday.  It's hard catching up with individuals.  Thank you to those people who have signed the poem after it has been shared.

As part of the science learning with Mr Hogue, he left a blog address on the whiteboard for anyone who wants to take a look.      hoguesblog2013.blogspot.co.nz

Homework

Reading: - please record the reading every night.

R.E: there is a sheet for home discussion which relates to the class learning in the Jesus strand.

Hard to believe that we are already in the second half of the term - time is flying.