Otakaro Discovery Time

Discovery Time
Last Friday we had our first Otakaro Discovery Time. During this time, all of the classrooms in Otakaro have various activities which the children can choose to participate in. Activities ranged from drawing, computers, sandpit, soccer, construction and water play. i would have to say that most popular was the pancake making! Thank you to Mr Lee, who came in and cooked pancakes with the children. He even brought chocolate sauce and berries!! Yum Yum!

If you click on the "Discovery Time" heading above, you will see our video.

Today Phoebe volunteered to read one of her reading books to the class - great reading, Phoebe!

Happy Valentines Day!

What a sweetheart! Cody spent the weekend making special cupcakes with his Mum. Today he came into class with 29 little cupcakes, all iced with pink icing and decorated with a heart shaped lolly. Yum! Yum! Thank you, Cody.
Cody with his gorgeous cupcakes.

Warren, Amelia and Cody enjoying their special morning tea treat.

More news...last week Miss O'Neill brought her fish tank to school. It is a big fish tank, with 7 fish and 6 water snails.
They are really interesting to watch!

First Post for 2011

Today was our first day at Wairakei School. I think most of the children were pleased to be back, and they did seem to enjoy their day.

Here are the gorgeous Room 10!

Yellow Dots!!!

Wow! We are so impressed with the attention our blog is getting around the world!

So today we are learning to use an atlas to find some of the countries where our blog is being viewed.

Thanks everyone!

Brave men...

Yesterday at 2pm, the whole nation stood still for two minutes so we could remember the brave men who died at the Pike River Mining Tradegy recently.

We discussed what this means, and the children now know that there are 13 children in Greymouth who now do not have a 'daddy', and that those men were somebody's uncle, nephew, son, father, brother, grandson, grandfather, nieghbour and friend.

At 2pm, Room 10 stopped their writing, put their pencils down and stood...to think about those families who have lost a loved one.

Well done, Room 10! You make me proud!

Our new classmates!!!

We have some new classmates!!!

A big welcome to Cecil, the water snail, six wee minnow fish, and a stick insect!!

Thank you to Carla Choi (Miss O'Neill's friend) for giving us Cecil and the fish (we haven't named them as they are too small at the moment). We are taking turns each day to feed the fish. We really like them because they have a bright blue stripe on them. Cecil spends the day eating oxygen weed!

The other day Hunter was writing a thank you letter to Carla and he noticed something crawling up his arm! It looked like a worm...we think he is a stick insect because most of the time he looks like a twig!

The day after...

On Friday we had a relatively 'easy going; day, as the night before was our last performance of Panto Pandemonium. We were all quite tired from 2 late nights and 4 performances...so the expectations were lowered a little that day.

Three girls, Emily, Piper and Olivia, learn Highland Dancing after school, and they had arranged to bring a CD into class for Friday News. Here they are performing a jig:



Here is Piper performing the Sword Dance (Miss O'Neill managed to find two long sticks to act as swords):


The weather was awful on this day. As the rain pelted down, the children had to stay inside to eat and play. Hunter has become quite the KING of the game Connect 4. I had 5 games with him and LOST each game!!! I thought he was so good that I arranged Caitlin to video us on our 6th game...unfortunately for Hunter I won that game. Hunter said I could put the video of him losing...as long as I wrote that he actually had won the 5 games beforehand...deal! You are a terrific player, Hunter!


Is it ok that I was so gleeful in front of a 6 year old???