We are authors

This week Room 4 literacy have been exploring their identity as authors. We started by looking at what makes a good learner:

We debated whether there is a difference between learning and behaviour. Then we looked at what helps us to write:

By King

Then we looked at some extracts from bestsellers and considered the aspects of the text that we liked:

What do you think is important in writing?

Our Whakapapa

Today in Room Four we have been inquiring into our history. We started by looking at our whakapapa and our different cultures, before we thought more deeply about the journeys of our ancestors.

We have all come from different countries, travelled different distances at different generations, but we have all made east Auckland our home and we all share at least one culture as New Zealanders.

This map illustrates the different countries that we are connected to and we have acted this out to make a virtual map of our classroom below.

Room 4 Literacy

This morning Room 4 Literacy introduced themselves to the members of their reading groups and took part in some challenges to help them to write their group norms.

Every group worked wonderfully together and we had a lot of fun taking part in the challenges. This will set us up really well for our literacy learning this year!

Room 4's Tree-ty

Today room 4 home class completed our class tree-ty. We chose four main articles of our treaty and then elaborated on each of them. Our final team building challenge was to act out each of the articles so that Mrs Stone could take a snapshot of us illustrating the value. Check out our articles below:

Day 2!

Today we discussed the importance of a Class Treaty and the way that we would Room 4 to be.
We started by sharing our prior knowledge about the Treaty of Waitangi; why it is significant and how we must learn from it. We considered the issue of translation between the Te Reo and English versions which illustrated why we must all understand and agree to the same terms.

We completed a challenge to help us to identify the key elements of a successful class. We were given a roll of duct tape, a bundle of string and 20 pieces of old spaghetti. Our challenge was to build the tallest tower that could hold the weight of one marshmallow.

In a hilarious series of events, the majority of our towers buckled under the weight, but we learnt a lot from the experience. We considered what made some groups more successful and what rules we should put in place to ensure that everything remained fair.

We have now drafted our class treaty, so it is time to practice enforcing it.

First day of 2019

Today was the first day of school for 2019. It was wonderful to see that everyone was excited and ready to start back.

In room 4 we began our day with a series of team building games and activities so that we would get to know each other better. We all had amazing attitudes and were not afraid to work with people who we did not know yet.

 

We then returned to class to discuss how we can work together best in Room 4 and what enabled us to be effective in our team building activities.  These ideas will support us to succeed this year and they will be the foundation of our class treaty.