Week 3 Term 3

Thank you to all of you who joined us for mass last Friday.  Your children are always excited to have you celebrate mass with them.  I was so proud of everyone for their participation and leadership.  Thanks too, must go to Celia and Reuben our school Kapahaka leaders who so ably supported Keira and Bobbie, who led our Maori waiata. Just having you sit with them gave them the confidence to do a remarkable job.  Much appreciated and another example of how our senior students support our younger learners.

Thank you Mrs Brydges for visiting us last week and taking us on a tour of the school gardens. We are very happy to be called the Guardians of the Gardens, as we are the class closest to them. In our first week of learning about "Reduce, Reuse and Recycle" we thought about what these words mean and what we can do ourselves to make a difference.  For reduce our ideas were: not bringing food in wrappers to school and trying not to use gladwrap or plastic bags. For reuse we thought about bringing food in containers, using special sandwich wrappers and also bringing some of our home food scraps for the school garden.  After our visit to look at how Mrs Brydges and the Enviro Group are making good soil, our last suggestion would really speed up this process by having more scraps to add to the compost heaps.

Help: a number of people did not have their homework books at school on Friday - once again it will be 'catch up Monday'. I sort homework books at the weekend and make sure things are set up for the week. Please encourage your child to take responsibility for having their book at school on Fridays.

This week we will have a variety of visitors in our class.  Father Pat, David Hill and also people from the Education Review Office.  We welcome them to join us in our learning.

Next Monday afternoon we will be going over the Railway Bridge to the cross country track to have our run there. I need 2 or 3 parents to accompany us please. This run will give us the opportunity to try ourselves out on the course that we will run on Wednesday 12th. Last week our training at school was minimal owing to the sickness that was in our class and the cold temperatures outside. We will train again this week, so wear your runners. Sports uniform may be worn - this means green track pants please.

Maths: We continue our learning about measuring length this week and move on to estimating metres.   We will be doing hands on measuring again and also some design, where we are designing and drawing pirate ships to metre specifications. See what you can find out about what pirate ships look like before Wednesday.

Homework

Reading: record your reading in your log. This term's reading WALTs are:

• reading like talking using the punctuation 
• reading on to the end of a sentence when stuck on a word, then think about words that would fit that start with the initial letter - check that it makes sense, looks right and sounds right 
• having eyes run ahead of the voice to check the visual details of the anticipated word before an error is made
• think about the precise message the author is giving and find precise words in the text to answer comprehension questions 

Spelling: For the next 2 weeks we are looking at the 'er' spelling patterns. Most people are now conducting confidently and are able to record the sound lines after tooling. Be sure now to really listen hard to the sounds as they are recorded and check what the piece to learn is in each word.

Maths: Cut a piece of string or cardboard to a 1 metre length and measure around the house and the garden.  Estimate what will be more than a metre, about a metre or less than a metre. Activities on Study Ladder too.

Cross Country Training: Take a run each day.

Looking forward to another great week of learning.  I do hope that we are all fit and well again.  Please remember that washing hands and staying home when really sick helps us all to stay well.