Merry Christmas

I would like to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year,  and take this opportunity to thank all the Room 18 families for your support during 2019.  I have had a fabulous year helping everyone with their learning.

I wish everyone the best in 2020, and hope to catch some of you after school or on lunch duty to say "Hello" and find out how you are getting on in the Kokutu Team.

Christmas Party

On the last Wednesday of the year, we had a Christmas party.  Everyone brought something for a shared lunch and we all wore Christmas cracker hats.  It was one of the last times to us to enjoy each others' company before we leave the Weka Team.

Christmas mushrooms

Everyone in Room 18 has been working hard to make a Christmas present for their family.  This year,  we sneakily started four weeks ago.  We made mushrooms out of clay and then left them to dry out for three weeks, cunningly hidden on the top of our tall classroom cupboards.

After they had been fired in the kiln, we painted them.  We painted them with a white undercoat first; then we painted the gills on the underside of the mushroom.  Finally, we painted the caps in different colours.

It was fun to position them under the oak tree in the junior playground and see them sprout.   On the last day of school, we made gift tags for them and attached them to the stems to take them home for Christmas presents.

Pool Party

Room 2 and Room 18 were the first classes to return all their library books at the end of the year.  Our reward was a pool party with hot chips at the end, and ten minutes free play.  Let the good times roll!

We even made it into the Cockle Bay Face Book page!

What makes things tick?

This year, we have been dismantling electrical equipment on the Science Table to see the technology that makes things work - these are the inner parts of a computer, monitor and TV.

Paper chains

It starting to get a bit like Christmas . . .

We worked in groups to make the longest paper chain we could in the shortest time:

Fraction Fruit Salad

We practised making fractions from shapes by dividing fruit into different fractions to make a Fraction Fruit Salad on Friday.

We halved these grapes.

We cut these apples into quarters.

We cut these apples into eigths.

We cut this piece of orange into quarters.

Rylee had a cunning tool to cut grapes into quarters!

It tasted pretty good when we mixed all out fruit fractions together.

Fraction Playdough Balls

We combined all the strategies we have been learning about multiplication, repeated addition and problem solving to work out fractions of sets of numbers.

Photo shoot

Can you spot the mystery person?

Tryathalon

This year, Ronnie competed in the Weetbix Tryathalon.  He trained after school and in lunch time sessions with Mr Dyer to prepare for the big day.

Here are all the competitors from Cockle Bay after they crossed the finish line.

Weka Day Camp chapter books

After our day camp, we spilt into writing groups and each group collaborated to make its own chapter book.  We each wrote a chapter and drew a picture with pastels to illustrate it.

Here are a selection of camp art, but you can see everyone's work on the Visual Arts page:

Here is an illustration of our tramp.

Here is an illustration of the orienteering.

Here is an illustration of cooking sausages.

Here is an illustration of erecting tents.

Here are the writers with their finished publications:

Kento, Liam, Jeremy and Green are the Adventure Writers.

Charlize, Kavesha, Taylor and Hayden are the Weka Writers.

Andrew, Rylee, Summer and Alyssa are the Camp Writers.

Ronnie, Bonnie, kate and Charlotte are the Botanic Garden writers.

Luke, Nico, Lincoln and Juwon are the Camping Machines.

Here are the promotional photo shoots of each writers' group: