Mobile Phones in the Classroom

After much consideration Bill, Bex and Jay have decided to trial allowing senior students to keep their mobile phones on them while at school. Children in the middle and junior school will still be expected to hand their phones in to Hela before school starts each day.

The reason for allowing senior students to hold on to their phones is that, we believe, mobile phones can be a valuable learning tool in the classroom. Some ways in which we will be encouraging senior students to use their mobile phones will be to encourage them to use the camera, calculator and internet functions on their phones.

The responsibility for looking after a mobile phone will reside with the kids, which links directly to developing the key competencies from the new curriculum. Children will be welcome to continue to leave their phones with Hela during the school day, if they choose to.

The trial will last until the end of Tern 4.

Speech Competition

Yes! The moment we’ve been waiting for and dreading for weeks is nearly over - SPEECHES. The senior speech competition was on Thursday last week, that’s sixty kids performing for a whole day! Anyway, the judges gave their comments and by the end of the day we had our semi-finalists: Anna, Asia, Hannah, Ngawhera, Raiha Matt, Olive, Rohit and Georgina. They had all given fantastic speeches. But unfortunately there could only be two children going to the Central Zone Speech Competition. On Monday, this week, we had another speech competition for the senior finalists. The judges had a really hard job choosing the winners as the standard was so high. Ngawhera and Olive won. They will represent our school tomorrow. Good luck!

Olive and Ngawhera

Welcome to Term Three

We have a whole lot of fun stuff in store for this term. Here are some of the highlights:

DRAMA
This term we have a professional drama teacher coming in every Wednesday morning to teach us about the performing arts. So far we have had one lesson and we all thought it was great. During that lesson we played heaps of fun drama games. Next week we will be starting to play different characters. Later on Mel (our drama teacher) will be picking some of our talented students to create and perform a play at the end of the term.

GYMNASTICS
As part of our P.E our class will be doing gymnastics every Monday and Friday. We will be using the beam for balancing, the mats for forward and backward rolls, the box (also known as the horse) for jumping onto or over and our mini trampolines for jumping on.

3 WAY CONFERENCES
This term we will be doing three-way conferences. This is when we show our parents what we have been doing at school and how well we are doing. At the moment we are preparing as hard as we can to get all our work together. The first ones start next week on Monday and go on for at least two weeks. For the people who are going next week we wish them luck.

STUDENT TEACHER
We will be having a student teacher coming in to help out Jay with us naughty kids. Her name is Mariah Miles and she will be joining us on the 3rd of August.

We all can’t wait for this term to end! Just joking, we really can’t wait for this term to kick off.

By August and Jess

DAYS OF OUR LIVES

Hello and Welcome to another instalment of our blog.

This week we have been doing dance photos. We found dance photos on the internet and printed our favourite one. We then made a border for it and wrote a question about the dance in the picture. They are all displayed around the classroom and they look awesome.

As usual, our noses are being kept to the grindstone with the love-it-or-loathe-it STAGE CHALLENGE. Thankfully, most people seem to be closer to the love it end of the spectrum.

In the dance side of it we have been practising like mad and we have two sections of dance. Pagan comes in once or twice a week to help us.

On the production side of Stage Challenge, we are doing things varying from designing the costumes to stalking the dancers with video cameras. The costumes are baggy white T-shirts with black trackies for the boys and black leggings for the girls.

By Hannah and Asia.

POETRY

This term we have been learning about poetic writing. We have been practising our use of figurative language (personification, simile and metaphor) to make our description more interesting.

This week we wrote some poems that compared being confident with being self-conscious. This helped us to think about how we will need to mentally prepare ourselves for Stage Challenge.

Here are two of the poems:

We were learning about personification, how it gives human abilities to some things that are not human.

‘The tree waved its arms in the wind.’

But trees don’t have arms, they have branches and that’s why we use personification to make our writing more interesting.

We have also learned that similes and metaphors make writing more interesting.

‘Jay’s hair is as curly as the roaring ocean.’

This is a simile for it has an ‘as’ in it but you can also use ‘like’ to compare different things.

Metaphors use ‘is’ to leave a vivid impression on the reader.

‘Her hair is black silk.’

Thank you for taking the time to read what we have been writing about recently.

By Jan and Alex

Back To School

We’ve just done a statistics test this week to see if we have improved since our last statistics test (from the beginning of the year). We have also done our first measurement test, as this will be our focus for this term.

This term our main focus is Stage Challenge. We have been working with Pagen to make a dance about technology.

We went to the Museum of City and Sea. We went to look at a pottery exhibition. It had different types of pots, from big to small, plain to colourful and old to new. Then we went to a work shop to make a sushi plate. It was very fun though some of the pottery was hard to make. Unfortunately, some people were not allowed to come because they hadn’t brung a water proof jacket.

By Jono and Keegan

Term Two Curriculum

Here is a basic overview of the major curriculum focuses for this term:

English
Listening comprehension, performing monologues, journal writing, explanatory writing, poetry, spelling/vocabulary, punctuation, reading a range of texts, reading comprehension.

Maori
Basic language skills

Learning Languages
Japanese

Mathematics and Statistics
Measurement and Number (place value and addition/subtraction/multiplication/division).

The Arts/Inquiry
Stage Challenge (Dance)

Physical Education and Health
Child-led games and sports, fitness.

Technology
Mount Cook School Technology classes

Statistics

Here are three good websites for brushing up on your understanding of statistics:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/ks3bitesize/maths/handling_data/index.shtml

http://nzmaths.co.nz/learningobjects/317/4 (thorndon30 / school40)

http://www.mathletics.co.nz/

Our Environment Rocks!

This term we have been working on a Vision Map for our school environment. This is a 3-d map of our school environment that helps us focus our thinking towards any changes that will help improve our environment. To start the map we went out and found the borders of the school, and then we went back inside and went into groups and decided what we wanted to put on our Vision Map. We have also been working on some bird stories about the environment. We have also carried out some statistical investigations about how other kids feel about the school environment and what they want to change too.

By Logan and Ashleigh

We will be having a grand unveiling of our Vision Map at lunchtime (12:30 - 1:30) on the last day of term. Please come along to celebrate with us.

Funky Time in Room 9

These past few weeks in Music we have been choosing a year out of a hat.
We then study the music of that year. Last time we picked 1984 and got to listen to a little bit of Michel Jackson and we saw a video you might have heard of. Thriller, in our opinion, is one of the cheesiest, most useless videos we’ve ever seen. It was thirteen minutes of our lives that we’ll never see again.
Here is a link, check it out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcIy1B71G4Y

But we want your opinion, so leave a comment and tell us what you think.

And in dedication to someone who we all find very special –

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7TClB6kmhA

By Kahurangi and Taylor

Madness at Thorndon

Last week we went to the Garden Centre and we now have a planted garden box, and some herbs in pots.We also have a hanging bird house that has been visited by tui and a model turtle we persuaded Jay to buy.We hope our garden will continue to thrive.

Last week we went to a a dance workshop. We learnt how to do maori dance moves with taiaha, which was a lot of fun, if more than a little confusing. This is something that you must only try if you heal from bruises quickly!

On Wednesday, a certain ruler of the country,commonly known as John Key, came to visit our school for World Maths Day.He walked in, got swamped by children,went up to Rm 6 ,graffited peoples paper and t shirts and left.

It has been a great week and we hope you have enjoyed reading our blog.

By Hannah and Asia.

Room 9 Gardens

It has been another excellent week. There have been two highlights. The first, is that we have planted our garden and now wait for a bumber crop of vegetables in the coming weeks. The second highlight was having Tane Grey (director of ' Maui against the Gods') take us for a dance workshop. It is guaranteed that some of the moves he taught us will be on display in next term's Stage Challenge performance.

Jay

Our Place

A major focus this term is the school environment. This has been chosen as a whole school topic in the hope that we can all work together to improve the school environment, so as to make it an even better place to learn.

We have already used our school environment as inspiration for some pastel drawings. The results have been spectacular and can be viewed in the classroom. For those of you unable to pop in, here are some for you to look at.

Welcome

Kia Ora –

The first (full) week is over and I am pleased to say that it has been a really good start to the year. The kids appear to be happy and have already displayed a willingness to work hard and help each other out.

Should you ever wish to talk to me about an issue that arises then the best way to do this is to send an email (jay@thorndon.school.nz) as I check my emails through-out the day (though please feel free to drop into class, or call me at school as well). It would be really helpful if you could send an email to me in the next few days with any questions you may have, or just to say hi, as then I will have a copy of your email should I need to contact you that way. 

I also have a couple of requests. Firstly, if you have an old microwave oven, that is not being used, then I would love to have it, as the kids can then heat up lunches in the classroom. I have also asked the kids to bring in any old magazines that they have finished with as these are really useful in the classroom – could you please remind them to have a ‘chuck-out’. 

I look forward to meeting you all next Friday, at our ‘Meet the Teacher’ BBQ.

Regards,

Jay