Month: November 2018

Introducing our new family member, baby egg Brucey.  Olivia has to keep Brucey alive, unbroken and cared for until Friday.  Olivia is not allowed to leave Brucey unattended – she needs to find a minder if she is busy playing soccer or not able to care for Brucey.  This is going to be hilarious!!!!! The special eggs were handed out today and apparently many are broken already!  Here is to Brucey surviving until Friday.  The senior children have athletics day tomorrow so they have organised a creche/daycare for their little egg babies. Apparently I am not allowed to roll my eyes and say, “Welcome to the world of parenthood”, anymore and we have only had Brucey for one day!

We had a big big talk in Room 5 about being kind.  We gave ourselves a goal to say something nice to a friend at morning tea and lunchtime.  We also played a game inviting some people up in front of the class and we would share something we liked about that person or something they were good at. We also talked about how we feel when someone says something nice to us.  Being kind is a very important value in Room 5. 

We really had to get our maths thinking sorted today as we added up our homework points and talked about the easiest way to tackle this as they were big numbers. We talked about making ‘easy numbers’ , ‘tidy numbers’ and we start with what we aready know.  For example we know 5 +5= 10 so 500+500=1000.  We then had to add the new points onto the old points.  This is where the place value house is really helpful to keep the digits in the correct place value column. 

We looked at the celebration of Diwali this morning.  The children researched so many facts at home!  So impressed.  We then worked in groups and brainstormed and shared our ideas.  We wrote our facts down in full sentences after all this hard work. 

We are one of the many households around New Zealand with a teenager studying for NCEA exams at the moment.  The next three weeks have us in an ‘exam bubble’ with Georgia studying hard. The wine is chilled in our house (for me) and a lovely tonic to ensure I remain zen like.  This will be you in ten years time!!  It is great reminder to me to get our children into good learning habits early so when it comes to ‘crunch time’ like it has for Georgia, they have the skills to manage themselves through a stressful time.

We are using place value houses in maths to show digits/columns and number value.  This is really useful to show the children  how adding multi value digit numbers works, for example 10 + 110 = 120 or 100 + 100 = 200 or 20+ 200 = 220.  If the children use a place value house to hold the value of the numbers it is easier for them to see where to add to. 

These clever ladies made lots of words during reading today.  This is a great activity to support reading, sounding out letters and ‘chunking’ letter sounds together. Well done!

Well done to these beautiful children who do lots of follow up work after reading.  They got Principal stickers today for all their hard work.  Alison was very impressed!