Places for Kids on the Hibiscus Coast

Hey kids! Do you know what is fun for kids on the Hibiscus Coast this holiday? We found all these ways to have a good day out.  
Click on each thing to find out more! 
By Maya, Jackson, Cohen, Keigo and Bianca

Whangaparaoa Railway 

Snowplanet 

Shakespear Regional Park 

Silverdale Adventure Park 

Best Playgrounds 

The Cycle Track

Week 9

Exciting times are afoot in M1! We have started delving into our personal inquiries and here are the main lines of inquiry the children have chosen to follow:

Places in our community:
1. Places for kids in the community
2.Outdoor places in the community
3. Places to relax in the community
4.Places to eat in the community

Help in our community:
1. How can we be of help to our families at home
2.How do people work together to make our school run
3. How are blind people helped in our community

So far, we have brainstormed our prior knowledge and had several groups interviewing and collecting data from their classmates, groups looking on Google Earth to locate outdoor places on the Coast and even google searching using key words like "places kids Hibiscus Coast". We will continue our great finding out for the whole of Week 9 so stay tuned!

In Reading, you might notice that your child may bring home a script for a simple play to practise instead of a reader one night this week. Putting on little plays in our class during reading time will become a regular part of our reading tumble this year. It's a great activity for 5 year olds as it requires them to follow along even when it is not their turn to talk, learn how to read a basic script, and add expression to their reading. Have fun taking on different roles at home. It's a great chance to get the whole family involved!

In Writing this week we are learning about writing about a small moment in our lives. This is an idea we will keep coming back to throughout the year. Often when you read a young child's story they try to tell you everything they did in a day, sometimes even carrying on to the next day, all strung together will a million "and then..." sentences. To help children produce better, more focused stories, even from the very early stages of writing, we teach children to think of their life in terms of a watermelon. That's right! A watermelon.
This week the children will learn that their lives are like BIG watermelons. To tell everything they did would make our story too big! Instead we need to slice the watermelon and find a tiny seed idea and then talk about just that part. For example- A day at the beach might be our watermelon topic, but having a wave wash away your sandcastle might be the seed idea. We zoom in on the seed idea and tell just about that part by adding lots of details.

In Maths, we continue learning about Symmetry through some fun maths stations, exploring what is and is not symmetrical. We are continuing to work on our addition and subtraction strategies, working towards being able to image simple addition and subtraction in our heads by counting on and back. 

Reminders: 

• This will be our last week for swimming as the pool is getting pretty chilly! 
• Kids-bring your bike again this Thursday for some more riding fun
• Remember library books for Wednesday
• Jo is at a course on Monday- Lexia will be your teacher
• Keep up the amazing spelling practise at home. It is really helping at writing time 
• If you are free on Tuesday or Wednesday afternoon and would like to help a little group with their personal inquiry, please let me know via email on jkember@wgp.school.nz . Looking for up to 4 helpers 

A huge THANK YOU and congratulations to those involved in organising the Gala on Saturday. What a wonderful event to bring together the local community!

It's hard to believe we are into Week 8 already. This week we will be focusing in on our personal inquiries and fine tuning our plans. The children have identified their interests as falling into either of the following two categories:

• Places in the community 
• Helping the community 

Stay tuned to find out where your child's interests and questions will take them.

In Reading, we will continue to use our Prediction comprehension strategy during our reading groups. The children will also be identifying the decoding strategies they already use well and setting a goal for their next steps in the area of decoding. The decoding strategies we use in class are:

Look out for these bookmarks in their book bag this week. Marked with a dot will be the decoding strategy they have chosen to focus on. 

In Writing, we are learning that good writers can stretch their ideas out over pages by adding details. This is important for several reasons as it increases mileage, stamina for writing, idea development and sense of self as a writer. By working in blank booklets and not in their exercise books, children begin to see themselves as an author, just like the published authors we find in our library. A blank page allows them to begin thinking about playing with layout, font or using punctuation like ... to build suspense as they get more adept at writing for an audience.  It's not always pretty to look at, but a lot of thinking goes in to the creation of these draft books. We can fix it up and fancy it up if we decide it is one we want to publish. We have a few more children finishing their publishing, so if you haven't seen their pattern book in the Poem and Sharing folder yet, stay tuned-it's not far away. 

In Maths, we are learning about symmetry. Symmetry is when one shape becomes exactly like another if you flip, slide or turn it. We will be exploring what is and is not symmetrical and creating some symmetry of our own. 

This week: 

Tuesday & Thursday are our swimming days

Wednesday we are off to the library 

We are bike riding with Y3/4 on Thursday Please bring your bike and helmet if you have one

This week in M1 we welcome our new Learning Assistant Marissa Steyn. We will share Marissa with M2. We are excited to have her join our class!

At Whangaparaoa School we have adopted the following Inquiry Cycle:

This week, we will begin moving from sorting out our information, to the 'Going Further' stage. This is a very exciting and 'buzzy' stage of our inquiry. In this stage, students will be encouraged to pose their own questions based on their wonderings or areas of interest around the topic of Community. For the next few weeks, children will be encouraged to formulate a simple question, make a plan of action to find out information, carry out that plan and then move into the reflecting and acting stage of the cycle with help. While it can seem quite complicated for 5 year olds, it is actually very intuitive for our young learners. The questions do not need to be tricky- it could be as simple as 'What can people do in our community?'  or ' How do people help each other in our school/local community? '  They may plan to find information by talking to people, walking around their community, calling people on the phone, writing letters/emails to people (with help) etc. When it comes to reflecting and acting, they may then decide to do something like- Make a list of cool places for kids in our community, host a morning tea for those people who help in the community, make a poster or show kindness by helping someone in the community. Having conversations at home about possible ideas might help your child tune in to their own wonderings too.

In Reading, we are continuing on with our comprehension strategy of Predicting. We are also talking about how good readers can 'read' unfamiliar stories by looking carefully at the pictures and imagining how the story might go. This strategy give emergent readers the confidence to have a go, and pulls together two of the recent strategies we have been working on- activating prior knowledge and predicting.

In writing, we are learning that good writers get their writing ready for an audience by fixing it up and then fancying it up. They are taking one of their pattern books from week 6 and preparing it to share. As they finish publishing, we will slip it into their blue 'Poem and Sharing' folder in their book bags for you to celebrate at home. We are learning a new strategy to help us tackle tricky words in writing this week. It is called 'Clap and Tap'. We will first begin learning how to clap the syllables in longer words and then isolate each syllable and tap out the sounds we can hear. This helps the children to more accurately hear the middle sound in long words. It can take a lot of practise for the children to learn to do this, so we will be reinforcing this skill in our word work groups also over the coming weeks by engaging in a lot of syllable activities.

Our learning continues around the passing of time this week in maths. Children will be sequencing events in order and continuing to learn about events over the week. We are also learning about compliments of 5, 10 and 20 depending on the stage we are up to in maths. These are combinations of numbers that equal either 5, 10 or 20. Knowing these combinations helps children access their basic facts quickly. We have been singing along with what is possibly the weirdest maths song ever made as part of our maths warm-up in the morning. The children LOVE it!

Apologies for missing library last week. We were so into what we were doing in class that we forgot to go to our session!! We will be back this Wednesday!

Swimming continues this Tuesday and Thursday.
Have a great week!

Sing along with M1's learning videos at home- Follow the link to a blendspace collection of our favourites. It will be added to over the year, so keep checking in and make requests if you have some favourites of your own! 

M1 Learning Videos Blendspace

Week 6

The first six weeks are the most important in setting the tone for the school year.  Already this year the children have established routines that will provide a secure rhythm and framework to their school day and allow them to focus of the learning at hand. Friendships are consolidating and stamina for tasks is growing rapidly. It's a pretty exciting time to be in M1!

In Maths, we are continuing to work in our small groups on our addition and subtraction strategies. These strategies follow a typical continuum of development and your child will be working on developing the next strategy in sequence from the strategy they are currently employing to solve addition and subtraction problems. At Year One the main strategies we are developing are:

• Solve addition and subtraction problems by counting all the objects 
• Solve addition and subtraction problems by counting all the objects in our head
• Solve addition and subtraction problems by counting on or back  from the largest number in my head 
• Solve addition and subtraction problems by counting on or back in tens and ones 
• Solve simple problems mentally by using basic facts we know- doubles, fives, making ten, tidy numbers, place value. 

We will also be discussing the passing of time and making a timeline of events throughout the day. We will be discussing the sequence of the days of the week and events that happen on the different days. 

In Writing, we will continue reinforcing the writing cycle we learned about last week because good writers are never 'done'. We will be looking at authors who use patterns in their books, including in our early readers we bring home and try emulating this in our writing by creating pattern books of our own. 

Our focus in Reading is- Readers can 'read' an unfamiliar book by looking carefully at the pictures and imagining how the story goes. In guided reading groups we will be using the comprehension strategy of  predicting. 

Our Inquiry into Community is continuing. We have been gathering data by interviewing people at school about community. We still need more data though! This week I will send home some simple interview sheets similar to the ones we have been using at school. Please could you take a moment to let your child interview you about community to add to our data. The children should draw a simple picture to remind them of what you have said, but if you could please jot down your answer in the box also that would be helpful. I will include a couple of extra sets with each child in case they are feeling brave enough to interview someone in the community (dairy owner, sports coach etc) to get their perspective on what they love about our local community. 

Upcoming Events:

Swimming Tuesday & Thursday

Library Wednesday 

Gala Mufti Day Friday- Baked goods 

Gala Saturday 11 March 10-2pm 

Please keep sending in any spare plastic bags you have at home for use at the gala. 

Please also check that all items of clothing are named (including swimming gear) as we have had a lot of lost items lately. 

Bike Path Opening- Article and Video Link

Bike Path Opening- Article and Video Link