Making Milk

The Kids area of the Anchor website has some great info and a neat animated explanation of how Anchor produces their milk. Have a look together.

Assembly Stars

Congratulations today go to Angela - sharing her ideas and experiences from the farm trip, and Emil - fabulous progress with the size and neatness of his handwriting.

Well done you two, we are proud of you!

****And a double celebration for Angela who achieved her 100 nights of home reading certificate today as well!****

'Random Acts of Kindness' day

Hauraki School is celebrating 'Random Acts of Kindness' day on Tuesday 1st September, a day where everyone is encouraged to do something unexpected and kind for someone else. We have talked about this at school and the children had some great ideas. What will your family be doing?... Check out their website for inspiration.

Ambury Park Farm

Our thoughts on Wednesday's trip to Ambury Park farm...

Another reader achieves their goal!

Well done Reihana for achieving your 5o nights certificate.

You are such a great reader!

Yee Haa 100!

Well done J, you've made it to 100 nights.
Such a great effort...keep up the great work.

What a day we had at Ambury Park Farm!

We had such a great day at Ambury Park Farm...

Here we are ready to go...

This is the milking shed where we watched Lucy the cow being milked...



We learned that flies can be a problem for sheep so they have their woolly bottoms shorn...

Here we are setting off to see and feed the other animals on the farm...

Here we are feeding the hungry goat...

More people to be proud of

Congratulations to this week's music star...

and a fabulous reader who has achieved 50 nights of reading at home...

So proud of you both!

Our friend Harold

Our friend Harold the Life Education giraffe is off into space!!
Read all about in in the newspaper this morning!
We can keep in touch with what Harold is doing, seeing and learning by reading his space diary. Maybe we can even send him a message together?!

Using 10s frames

This website has some fabulous activities that link directly with our class numeracy lessons - great practise in counting and addition. Give them a try...let me know how you get on by leaving a comment!
The site can also be accessed from our "Websites worth a look" page too.

What a great start

Congratulations Hannah for achieving your first reading certificate for 25 nights of home reading. Well done, and keep it up.

Repeating Patterns

We are starting to learn about PATTERNS, so to discover what we already know about repeating patterns we made pattern snakes on Friday...

Pattern snakes are fun to make at home - just draw your snake shape, then use things from around the house to make your repeating pattern inside!

Well done you 2

Excellent work Benjamin and Harrison - receiving certificates at our Junior Assembly this afternoon. Benjamin is working confidently with numbers and starting to remember some basic facts. Harrison has tried really hard this week with the spacing of his handwriting - getting the letters closer together without squashing them.

It was a special assembly for Room 2 today because we were the speakers - well done to all 9 of you who stood up in front of all the Juniors - and we shared our bee collages. Lots of fun!

Our thoughts on making the butter...

Who makes the butter?

After making the butter we discussed whether or not there was a man at the dairy factory whose job was to shake cream all day...and we decided that there wasn't - there would be a machine to do that job!
We put our 'green hats' on, and drew what we thought the machine might be like...

Making Butter

Today we learned how to change cream into butter...MAGIC!
We put fresh cream and a pinch of salt into 2 jars and screwed the lids on very tight.
Then we shook and we shook and we shook and shook and we shook and we shook...
Harrison did a lot of shaking...

Before long it separated into butter and buttermilk. We strained the butter out, and spread it on freshly toasted bread - Yum!

Fantastic news!

We are very proud today of Tessa and J - who both received certificates at our school assembly...Tessa for retelling and comprehension, and J for working hard on his sight words. Keep up the great work.

Farmyard visitor

We had a visitor from the farmyard today!...Pinocchio the Bantam.
Thanks to our friends from Room 1 who brought their pet bantam in to show us. We learned she lays a small egg each day for the family to eat. She eats pellets and scratches in the ground to find her food. She had long, sharp claws and was covered in soft feathers. A couple of us were a bit scared of her!

Congratulations...

Congratulations Kody on reaching 100 nights! We are very proud of you and all your good work.

Take a look at this week's star...

Take a look at this week's star of the Junior Assembly:

Congratulations Tatenda on your quick and accurate adding and subtracting.

Artists in the making!

Today in Art we were exploring sketching with artists pencils. We explored different ways we could use the pencil... 'shouting' - dark marks, 'whispering' - light marks, shading - dark to light or light to dark, smudging and many more ways:

Then we had a really close look at a variety of farm animal pictures - photos, books and toys. We tried to use our new pencil sketching skills to sketch a (realistic) farm animal.
Can you see where our pencils have 'shouted'...'whispered'...shaded or smudged?

We're so proud of you...

Well done...

Ti'a received her certificate at Junior Assembly for being a caring and kind friend...


Hannah received hers for fantastic reading...


Samuel's is for balance and skills at PMP...


and 3 more awesome readers have achieved their next home reading milestone!
Well done to all of you!

The Farm

We used KidPix to make a farm. We used a farm background, added animations and stickers, and recorded our voice. All our KidPix pages have been put together as a movie -here is our movie...

Number Boggle

Today we played "Number Boggle" to learn and practise our basic facts for 10. We played with a partner, and had to look quickly for vertical, horizontal or diagonal numbers that added to 10.
Here are a couple of our attempts......

Perhaps you might like to play at home too - print off the 4x4 grid, grab a pencil and go!
(Just click on the 'More' button below and select print)

More Stars

We are so proud of you 3! Hannah, Samuel and Ti'a received their certificates at this Friday's Open Morning for reading, PMP and being a helpful friend.

Look at these fabulous readers...

Congratulations to both Benjamin and Juliana who have reached 100 nights this week, and to Ti'a, starting her journey with 25 nights. Well done to all of you, keep up the great work!

We are proud of...

We are very proud this week of Matthew...

and Reihana...

for the fabulous effort they have both been putting into their reading - finger pointing and word recognition. Well done guys, keep it up!

Down on the Farm...

Our farming adventure is underway...to help us understand some of the ways animals can be grouped we read about Mammals, discussed what we heard, then wrote everything we could remember on post it stickies. When we put them onto our define map we had to decide if the information was relevant to Mammals or not relevant...

Then we used the relevant ideas to write a definition of a Mammal...

now we all understand what "Mammal" means!

We have learned a lot of new words (vocabulary) including the special names for the father, mother and baby animals...

And we've discussed what we get from a variety of animals - we were very surprised to learn that the leather shoes, handbags and belts are made of is actually animal skin!