The Return to Room 9

Kia ora whānau,

How wonderful it is to be back together on site in Room 9!

We have been gifted with summer-like weather so we have made the most of it but learning both inside and outside of the classroom. A major focus over the past week or so has been social interaction for our tamariki. They have enjoyed activities such as:

• a science challenge to lift a plastic toy from the floor onto a desk using only balloons, string a small parts
• writing a Choose Your Own Adventure story in teams
• inter-class Capture the Flag games
• making a mural to represent our journey as a class through 2021

It has been a great chance to review the learning that took place during the lockdown too. Everyone is happy to be back and it is great to see plenty of smiles!

Greg

November 16 Update from Greg

Kia ora tātou,

Wow! Great news! We go back to Level 2 on Wednesday – you can see all your friends! This also means that you have one more day of distance-learning today. I would like you to try and finish as many tasks as you can. 

If you would like a new challenge, I have made a Google presentation on how to use Twinery.org to create a choose your own adventure story. I have embedded this for you below. I will also demonstrate this for you in our Zoom meeting at 10AM. 

See you soon!

Greg

November 15 Update from Greg

Kia ora tātou,

I hope you all had a great weekend.

This week is an exciting week because a lot of us will be returning to school! There are two more days before this happens so it is a great time to finish off activities and share your work with me.

I have set Pānui Daily 5 work for Week 5 – please see your Daily 5 planners. These can be found under "Pānui" or "Pānui Links". One new activity this week is an Education Perfect vocabulary activity. You have been asked to work on your word attack strategies so the Education Perfect vocabulary activity will be a great review for that. I will show you how this work in our Zoom meeting.

See you at 10AM! We will have a game of Drawasaurus!

Greg :)

November 12 Update from Greg

Kia ora tātou,

I hope your family all saw the update from Pippa about our return to school next week. If not, I have posted it for you at the bottom.

The weather has been like summer, hasn't it? Unfortunately the rain might be back late tomorrow and over the weekend.

I have added more tasks to our Pāngarau Weekly Planners (see "Pāngarau Links" on the right-hand side of the blog. Everything is related to statistics. There are more activities for Education Perfect, Mathletics and a task called "Choice Squares". We need to collect some data for this task, so I have created a two-question survey which everyone needs to answer. I will publish the results in your digital modelling books:

Kia ora koutou,

From November 17th this is the Hamilton East School plan for returning to school safely.

Your children will attend school for two days a week.

On Mondays and Wednesdays children with the last name from A-L (Group 1) will go to their own classroom.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays children with the last name from M-Z (Group 2) will go to their own classroom. 

Neither group will attend school on Fridays. Online home learning will continue.

The bus will be operating, masks are required. 

Year 3 & 4 - Rooms 15, 16, 18, 19, 20 - masks are required to be worn indoors during school hours.

Year 5 & 6 - Rooms 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 17 - masks are required to be worn indoors during school hours.

Essential Workers' children currently attending will continue with their allocated days in their own classroom.

This is organised through the Principal  by email.

Friday 26th November is a Teacher Only Day, a reminder that school is closed to all children.

Ngā mihi

Pippa Wright Principal

November 11 Update from Greg

Kia ora tātou,

I was so happy to hear that we will be going back to school next Wednesday, November 17th! Pippa will provide more details about how exactly classes will work when we go back. I also hope you are having fun with your forced perspective photography project. 

Today we are going to look at organising the data you have gathering with your surveys. You can find this presentation under "Pāngarau", but here it is below too:

November 10 Update from Greg (Forced Perspective Photography)

Kia ora tātou,

I hope you had some time in the lovely sunshine yesterday.

Thank you to those who finished their surveys for their statistical enquiries. These are all linked under "Pāngarau" and I need you all to complete each other's surveys. You need data so we can continue your statistical enquiries so I will give you another day to do this.

I have created an Mahi Toi project for you on Forced Perspective. There is a link to this under "General Links" and you can see the presentation embedded below. We will talk about this in our 10AM Zoom meeting and we will also have a treasure hunt. You don't need to prepare anything for this. 

I have also made and assigned an Education Perfect lesson on the Bossy R.

See you at 10AM!

Greg :)

November 9 Update from Greg

Kia ora tātou,

It feels like summer these days, doesn't it?

Thank you to those who finished their surveys. I would like everyone else to have one more day to finish their surveys. Can you please complete the surveys that have been finished? All of the topics are interesting and they don't take long to complete. You can find the links under "Pāngarau". The next step this week will be to analyse our data.

You have your Pānui Daily 5 tasks to continue with. I have also added a Pūtaiao article – "Whakaotirangi and her Kete of Kūmara". We will look at this in our Zoom meeting today

Today we will also have a game of Scattergories. This is a simple game, but you will need a pen and paper. I will show you five categories of things and you will have 2 minutes (120 seconds) to write down something that begins with a random letter. You can see an example below:

It will be fun!

See you soon,

Greg

November 8 Update from Greg

Kia ora tātou,

I hope you all had a great weekend! It was warm yesterday, wasn't it? 

I have given everyone new reading tasks – please see your Pānui Daily 5 Weekly Planners. This week a focus will be on the bossy R vowel sound. This a special long sound that we make in words like car, for, term, bird and turn. Do you see how there is an R after the vowel (A, E, I, O, U) in each word? Think about this makes a long sound. I noticed that a lot of your confused this vowel sound when you identify words like "car" or "far" as being CVC words. "Car" and "far" are definitely not CVC words – they use the bossy R. We will look at this more in our Zoom meeting today.

Thank you to those who have finished their statistical enquiry surveys. I have posted them under "Pāngarau" for everyone to answer like this:

I will show you during our Zoom meeting. We all need to answer each other's surveys so we can collect data to analyse. We will look at this more this week. So could everyone please answer Thai, Tyson, William and Yazeed's surveys? Everyone else, please finish yours so we can answer them too. Maybe you can get some ideas from these students. 

You can also find a new word search for "City of Bugs" and there is a new literacy mystery. 

See you at 10AM – the link is the same as always!

Greg :)

November 5th Update from Greg

Kia ora tātou,

I hope you are all well.

A few of you have made a start on your statistical enquiry so thank you. We will see what topics you have in mind today during our Zoom meeting and do some brainstorming together.

I hope you enjoyed the Drawasaurus game – we can do that another time as well. Today I would like to play Taboo. This is a game which can be played without using a website. I will send individual students a word that they have to make the rest of the class guess. However, there will also be some keywords that you cannot say, along with the main word that you want your classmates to guess. For example:

I might say "Tell the time." "What time is it? Do have a ____?" Hopefully someone will guess "WATCH" but I am not allowed to say "clock", "wrist" or "look".

I want everyone to continue with their statistical enquires today. Everyone has other tasks to work on too – please share your work with me by putting in your HES folders or emailing me photos. I have added another set of vocabulary on ailments to the te re Māori Hauora lesson so you can try that too. If anyone else wants more reading material, please let me know.

Have a great weekend!

Greg 

November 4th Update from Greg

Kia ora tātou,

Thank you Tyson for sharing a great idea for Zoom meeting: Drawasaurus. This is a fun activity that we can all use together. It is very similar to the game Pictionary which you may have played before. I will share the link for our class game room after our Zoom meeting starts on the "chat" function. I hope it is possible for us all to use this website while the Zoom meeting is going, but you could also participate by making your guesses on the Zoom chat if you can't open another website while you are using Zoom. Anyhow, we can try it!

We will also look at our statistical enquiry for birthday parties today. After we finish, your task today will be to start your own statistical enquiry!

Thank you to those who have shared more work with me. I always look forward to receiving your work. Don't forget that you still have the new Kea Kids News article to read and make questions too. If you haven't already, I would also like you to try the quizzes for the first two Kea Kids News articles that I gave you to read. You can find the links under "Pānui". You will also notice how I have used Google Forms to make these quizzes. We will talk more about Google Forms soon!

See you at 10AM!

Greg

November 3rd Update from Greg

Kia ora tātou,

I have updated everyone's weekly Pāngarau tasks: you can find these under "Pāngarau" on the right-hand side of the blog. I have added the link to our statistical enquiry for you to review. There are also statistics tasks on Education Perfect and Mathletics.

There is a new riddle today. Send me a screen shot of your time taken to complete the riddles – I wonder who can do them the quickest!

I have also added a new Kea Kids New article for which you can make some quiz questions. You can see the quiz for "Meet the Canterbury farmer who turns junk into art" below.

The weather is not as nice as yesterday but hopefully it will be okay in the evening. It is a good day to catch up on work:

• Pānui Daily 5 tasks
• Pūtaiao: "City of Bugs"
• Persuasive writing (you can also do more than one essay!)
• Lockdown Kitchen project
• Hamilton/Kirikiriroa flag design
• a new tinana picture for the Māori Hauora lesson

Please share your work with me.

See you at 10AM for our daily Zoom meeting!

Greg

November 2nd Update from Greg

Kia ora tātou,

Today we are going to start a new topic for maths – statistics. I will introduce a statistical enquiry to you. We will do one all together before you do your own. To get some more background on this topic, I have assigned you all the Education Perfect lesson on collecting data. I have also added a new riddle for today. Well done Tyson who has already solved yesterday's one!

Thank you again to those students (Opal, Yazeed, Luci and Brooklyn) who have made questions for the Kea Kids News articles. You can still add more questions.

Everyone has something to continue with:

• Pānui Daily 5 tasks
• Pūtaiao: "City of Bugs"
• Persuasive writing (you can also do more than one essay!)
• Lockdown Kitchen project
• Hamilton/Kirikiriroa flag design
• a new tinana picture for the Māori Hauora lesson

Please share your work with me.

See you at 10AM for our daily Zoom meeting!

Greg

November 1 Update from Greg

Kia ora tātou,

Sorry, we ran out of time during our Zoom call. To answer your question, you can email me your work like Yazeed and has done – he took photos of his written work. If you create a digital file using your Hamilton East School account, please put in into the correct folder (Writing, Reading, Inquiry or Maths) and I can see it. If you don't use your school account, just email me (gparkinson@hameast.school.nz).

Thank you to Yazeed and Opal for the wonderful quiz questions that they have written about "Kea Kids News: The kea with half a beak who uses pebbles to preen himself". Please read the article and test yourself on Yazeed ands Opal's questions, and some that I have added, at the bottom of this page.

Here are some new tasks that I have added for you:

• weekly Daily 5 tasks (click on "Pānui" at the top of the blog or go to "Pānui Links")
• a new riddle under "Pāngarau" at the top of the blog (and you can find the answer for Einstein's Riddle under "Pāngarau Links – Pāngarau Answers"
• a new Pūtaiao article "City of Bugs" under "Pūtaiao"
• a new Kea Kids New article that you can read and make questions for on turning art into junk

I would still love it if you shared your work with me on:

• persuasive writing
• Lockdown Kitchen
• a new image for Tinana (body parts) to replace the existing on the EP lesson
• your flag designs for Hamilton/Kirikiriroa

See you at 10AM for our daily Zoom meeting – please use the same link as last week!

Greg