Category: Ako | Learn

Welcome back everyone!

Welcome to 2023!  I am looking forward to working with your tamariki again this year and hope that you enjoy reading and sharing this Blog and Class Site with your family and friends.

We have been busy in Room 4 for the past week and a half focusing on routines as well as having fun with our Inquiry topic of ‘What I like.’   Our first topic was a favourite pastime of swimming/water.  This has been a high-interest activity that we partake in every day.

We have been learning about different animals which swim in the water as well as how to keep safe in the water ourselves and different uses for water.

                           

                     

 

Super Swimmers

We have been so very fortunate for the past few weeks to be able to swim on a daily basis in our school pool.

We have braved all the different types of weather but have still managed to have a lot of fun and learning within these few weeks.

I have been amazed at the beautiful interactions between all of our tamariki and the delight on the children’s faces while in the pool has been memorable.

All the children can now access the pool safely from sitting on the side of the pool to then sliding themselves down the wall to touch the bottom of the pool.  We have also been working on getting out of the pool from the side as well.  This works on their upper body strength.

       

 

I’m a Little Teapot

Our final nursery rhyme for the year is I’m a Little Teapot.

Our goal was to be able to complete all the actions of this rhyme.  We hope you enjoy this little video of Vaea joining in at music time to the actions.

We also created our own tipping teapot.  We firstly decorated the teapot with Christmas colours.  The next step was to cut out our teapot and stick it onto a paper plate which was folded in half.  We then gently tapped the teapot and it would rock backwards and forwards while we sang the rhyme.

We hope you have all enjoyed seeing some of our learning which is happening throughout the week.

 

Old MacDonald Had a Farm

This week our rhyme was Old MacDonald.

I would have to say that this rhyme was probably Room 4’s favourite of the term.  It has been a true delight to hear the rhyme being sung at different times throughout the day.

We were lucky enough to have Helen and Billy rejoin us today as well as some Room 3 students to help us sing Old MacDonald while we joined in with different instruments.

We were also learning about animals that live on farms compared to animals that live in zoos.  We had fun with a Lego Farm where we had to listen to an instruction as to where to put the different farm animals on the Lego Board.  This was a great hands on activity.

One of our many Old MacDonald songs was about a lion being on a farm.  The children all found this funny and would say “No, lion!” Following on from this idea we made a lion for our craft this week.  This linked in well with our Letter of the Week being ‘L’.  The children enjoyed using a fork dipped in orange paint for the mane of the lion.

We hope you enjoy the photos and video of our learning this week.

         

 

 

 

Jack and Jill

This week’s Nursery Rhyme was Jack and Jill.

We listened to and sang the short and long version of the rhyme.

We were also fortunate enough to have Room 3 visit us and we all sang the rhyme together and then acted out the rhyme with our friends.  What a lovely time we all had singing and acting together.

Later in the week we decorated our own pail with paint, attached our own handle, and stuck down the sentence “…..(name)………. went up the hill to fetch a pail of water.”

 

 

 

 

Hickory Dickory Dock

Our Nursery Rhyme this week has been Hickory Dickory Dock.

We have been learning about what mice eat and where they like to live.

We have also touched on telling the time, particularly the o’clocks.  This has been reinforced through songs and actions relating to different times.

Our writing has involved sequencing the Nursery Rhyme as well as matching the characters in the rhyme.

Our craft activity was a lot of fun once the mouse and clock had been coloured.  We sang Hickory Dickory Dock as our mouse was running up the clock.  The children all enjoyed this activity as their eyes tracked the mouse while their arms pulled the wool apart so the mouse travelled upwards and downwards.

 

 

Itsy Bitsy Spider

This week we have been singing and practising the actions of the rhyme Itsy Bitsy Spider.

We have been learning about what spiders eat as well as how spiders are different from insects.  To see more of our learning, click on the link to our class site on the right hand side of this page.  Go to the Week 4 Term 4 button under Reading.  I hope you enjoy the google slides as much as we do in class.

We had a lot of fun creating a spider that could move up and down the web as well as making a web from wool.

We also enjoyed sharing our learning with Room 3.  Room 3 came to visit us and our tamariki showed their spiders moving up and down their webs while we all sang along to the Nursery Rhyme together.  Thank you for joining us Room 3.  We love having you visit us!

 

Humpty Dumpty

This week we have been looking at the Nursery Rhyme Humpty Dumpty.

We have found many different versions of this rhyme that we have sung.  We acted out the rhyme, tested what would happen if an egg fell onto the ground as well as wrapping an egg up in bubble wrap to protect the egg.   We also created some eggscellent works of art where Humpty Dumpty was put back together with sticking plasters.

Earlier in the week, we began an egg experiment to see if we can make an egg bounce like one of the egg stories we listened to in our Google Slides.  Each day we checked our egg which was soaking in a jar of vinegar.  The children noticed the egg grew a little bigger and lots of bubbles formed on the outside of the egg.  After waiting two days we removed the egg from the jar and cleaned the egg.  When the children felt the difference between the egg which had been soaking for days and a regular egg the words ‘squishy’ and ‘hard’ were used completely independently.  Great work Ruma Wha!  Check out the photos and video attached below to see the results of our egg experiment.

What an exciting week of learning we have had!

 

  

   

 

Nursery Rhyme Graph

This term Room 4 and 5 are focusing on a variety of different graphs.

Room 3 has been leaving some lovely comments on our blog of late so Room 4 has been replying to their comments. Last week we asked Room 3 what their favourite Nursery Rhymes were.  Room 3 tallied the class votes and sent back their responses to us.  We used their data to form a bar graph.  We discussed the different parts a graph is required to have as a whole class and then created the same graph individually.  The completed graph was then shared with Room 3 and there were high fives from the whole class!  I love these beautiful connections which are constantly being made between Room 3 and 4 tamariki.

                                   

 

Hey Diddle Diddle

Room 4 has had a lot of fun this week with our Nursery Rhyme of Hey Diddle Diddle.  We watched and sang different versions of the rhyme and if you listen to the video below you will hear Billy and Helen singing a different version.

We also acted out the rhyme after each child chose which character they would like to be.  Thank you to Room 3 who also joined in with acting out our rhyme.  We hope you enjoy watching our short video clips below.