The term that was...

It's amazing to me that the term is practically over already. 4 busy days to go.

Reminders about this week:

1. Parent/Teacher interviews are on Monday and Wednesday afternoon. Hopefully, you have all booked times by now. Please note that school ends at 1.50pm on those days and your child is NOT permitted to walk home on their own. Children that cannot be met, will be looked after at school until 3pm. BTW. If any of you are unable to make it to the Monday/Wednesday interviews, please email me and we can set up a meeting for before or after school - next term if necessary.

2. Tuesday is Summer Sports Day. A lot of the children will be out of school all day for their respective sports. Please ensure your child has the appropriate gear, food, water etc.

As we have the sports awards assembly on Thursday afternoon, there are effectively no afternoons available for any teaching this week!

A look at last week:

Maths: last week we continued to look at calculating fractions of sets and in terms of Strand Maths, we also looked at reading and understanding coordinates. This week, we shall be recapping everything that we have covered this term with regard to decimals and fractions.

Writing: following on from our work on report writing, we looked at explanation writing. This week, we shall be having a quick look at narrative writing. In terms of narrative writing, the children have effectively been doing this each week via their homework.

Reading: we have covered inference, the use of keywords and phrases to help find an answer and also to enable us to make useful notes for the purpose of summarising a text.

Handwriting and grammar: steady progress is being made in both these areas. In terms of grammar, we have focused on a class-wide weak area: using apostrophes to show ownership. When looking at their homework, make sure they have got these correct (if you have the time :-)).

Topic: the children have been working on their own inquiries. We have already seen 2 excellent presentations. Next term, the topic will be Enterprise (no, not the US Starship ;-))

Te reo: we've been plugging away with greetings and simple phrases all term. The children wrote a mihi this week. Ask them if they can recite any of it for you!

Waterwise is over for the term as we have this Friday off. Gathering from the children's feedback, they loved it. Many thanks to all you parent helpers that made it possible.

And finally, some sad news.. The Rimmers are leaving glorious Auckland and moving down to cozy Christchurch at the end of this term. So we only have the pleasure of Finn Rimmer's company in Room 26 for 4 more days. Wishing you and your family all the best for your new adventure.

And finally, finally... a few more snaps from camp...

The week that was..

.. and it was camp! In my opinion, the best camp ever.. for 3 reasons: 1. There were no boring activities.. we had mountain biking and the ladder challenge activity for the 1st time, 2. Cyclone Pam ensured we had excellent surf on Monday and Tuesday which meant body boarding was fabulous and 3. It was really warm.. no need for long trousers or beanies this year!

The only downer that came to the fore on numerous occasions was the inability of the year group as a whole to listen or to quickly quieten down when instructors were speaking. We are all working on this across Year 6.

A HUGE thanks to all of the parents who came and helped + of course, to those parents who could not make it, thanks for ensuring the kids were dropped off and picked up on time and that they all had all the necessary gear.

Here are a few snaps:

Thursday was a tough day as we were all still quite tired. So the children did some camp follow up activities. In Maths, they carried out statistical surveys to find out things like what was the most popular activity at camp, the favourite meal, the average no. of crates achieved on Stack'em. In Writing, they all wrote reports on Camp Merc and in the afternoon they created a piece of art that reminded them of camp.

Friday was Waterwise. Sadly, 4 children did not bring their togs as they forgot it was on - even though I told them before they left on Thursday.. a lack of listening skills - yet again! Please try to remind them next week for our final session. 

Right, this week we have our year 6 planning day on Wednesday, Waterwise on Friday, then next week we are out on Tuesday for Summer sports day and school ends Thursday. In effect, not many full classroom teaching days left! How the time flies.

The week that was...

With Camp on the horizon, I think we had a hard core 4 days in terms of actually getting quite a lot of work done.

In Maths, we started work on calculating fractions of sets:

eg. What is 3/4 of 28?

The strategy for this being: divide 28 by the denominator and then multiply that result by the numerator. Ask your children if they can do this? Get them to give you an example. I have just looked through the books and am impressed at the number of children who seem to know how to do this. I also continued to 'maintain' the work we have done on decimals. This will be ongoing as a fair few children keep forgetting to remember about place value and so think 0.7 - 0.63 = 0.7.. (they say, I turn 7 into 70 and go 70 - 63 = 7 and then turn it back into decimals and come up with 0.7!).

In Writing, we finished up our work (for now) on report writing and will next be looking at explanation writing. The MAJOR weak area for most in the class is proofreading and editing. When reading their written homework, please be blunt with them if they are about to turn in a piece of writing that is riddled with mistakes. If you have the time, please help them use the dictionary as this is a skill that needs to be mastered.

In Reading, the top readers are underway with their novel studies. I am working with groups looking at inferring information from texts by looking for keywords. When reading with the children, you might like to ask them what a character in a book is like. What can they infer from the way the character is being described, from the character's actions etc.

Here are a few snaps of the children tearing it up during a brain break..

On Friday, we had our first Waterwise session. I get the impression that the kids all loved it. So that's great.

Right, batten down the hatches!!! Fingers crossed that Cyclone Pam doesn't cause too much havoc at camp. Look forward to seeing some of you there!


  

The week that was...

A tough week for me as I was out on Tuesday and Wednesday with a deadly dose of man-flu that I have finally managed to shake off... well, just about anyway.. :-(

On Monday we had the swim sports day at Sacred Heart. All of the children gave their all and we witnessed some rather close competition.. the video referee was required on a number of occasions! Despite the sweltering conditions, it was an awesome event thanks to Keith's amazing powers of organisation and you, the parents because of your willingness to give up your time to both assist and support on the day. Many thanks for that :-)

Writing: we did not make as much progress with Report writing as I'd hoped as I missed a couple of days. However, we shall be hitting this writing genre hard this week. (BTW. The HW results are demonstrating some phenomenal narrative writing skills..)

Maths: we ended our work on decimals and started our work on fractions. Now this is a great one to practise at home on pizza night or big bar of chocolate night! eg. how much pizza would you get if we were to share it evenly among 3 people? What if we had 2 pizzas and there were 5 people? How much would each person get? The key to this work is getting across the concept of equal sharing. So for the 2nd example, take 1 pizza and divide it equally by 5 people (1/5 each) and then do the same with the other.. means they get 2/5 each. Now, we shall be covering this in depth this week, but you may like to quiz your children on it. I shall also be doing 10 minutes of maintenance per group per day on decimals so that our first few weeks' work doesn't disappear into the ether! Get your child to demonstrate the Battleship game off the blog.. it's quite handy for grasping the relative size of fractions.

Reading: finally got the top readers organised for their novel studies. The others finished their research work which will tie into report writing and inquiry. I shall also be incorporating RFP into the rotation (Reading For Pleasure) from this week as I don't want the children to have the joy of reading battered out of them with too much comprehension-related work.

Te Reo is chugging along nicely. We only do one session a week, but I think the children (and me) are starting to remember some of the phrases.

Watewise: sadly cancelled due to it being too windy. Instead, we spent Friday doing some shield art. The idea was for the children to put 4 things on their shields that represented who they are.. again, this tied in well with our connections (whanaungatanga) work in Topic.

Peryn brought in his slack-line on Friday (I'd never heard of one till then!), so the children had a fun half hour trying to balance and bounce on it. Thanks to Peryn for setting it up and to Peryn's Dad for the idea!

Reminder: Camp is next week (week 7) from Monday to Wednesday. Please pay if you have not done so already. The camp has to know exact numbers in order to know how many instructors to organise.