Painting The Gardner's Maze

This week our Big Book was The Gardner's Maze. Today we painted small hedge plants to make our own little maze on the wall. We worked on our own but it was a real team effort to paint enough to make the maze. Three different greens and some yellow gave a great effect. We didn't even use water to rinse our brushes because we learned how to unload the brushes by painting out the excess onto newspaper.

Letter to Mrs O'Donnell

After Mrs O'Donnell responded to our post about what we found in the rainforest we decided to write her a letter. She was very keen to find out what is special about a toucan. The extra large letter is on the wall in room 3 but we think Mrs O'Donnell won't mind if you share her letter here. Thanks to the wonderful kids in room 3 for all the great ideas for the letter.

Dear Mrs O'Donnell

We have learned a lot about tropical birds. We noticed a lot of different beaks on the birds.

The Harpy Eagle has a sharp beak to eat small birds and animals. The macaw has a strong beak for eating nuts with hard shells. The quetzal has a tiny beak to eat little bugs.

The Toucan has a humungous beak to eat large insects and fruit.

We hope you get to see our pictures.

From Room 3.

Room 3 measures up!

We've been learning about measurement over the last two weeks. We know lots of words like long, short, thin, wide, tiny, huge, closest and furthest away. Yesterday we compared our footprints to giant's footprints and tiny little footprints.
Our feet were bigger than the tiny little footprints but much, much smaller than the giant's
footprints.

In the photos you can see a group of us comparing our feet with the feet we drew. Briah's foot is much, much smaller than the giant's footprint. Aden is comparing both big and little at the same time!!

What's in a Rainforest?

We have had a very busy first week back. We welcomed Mykee into Room 3 and have been finding our way around after Mrs Bennington made some changes in the holidays.
The strange creature on the wall turned out to be a toucan from a tropical rain forest. We've started learning about rain forests and read a cool book about the Cat in the Hat called If I Ran the Rainforest? We thought very hard about what we might see in a rain forest after reading the book and here are our ideas.

We will definitely see some of them as we continue our journey through the forest.

Have a lovely holiday!

Today is our last day for term 2. 

Devin is moving to Christchurch in the holidays to be closer to his grandparents. We will miss you Devin! 

Stefan had a birthday earlier this week and is now 6 years old. Mrs O'Donnell is having a big long break working from home on a school project and will be back in Term 4. 

We had a special morning tea to say "Goodbye" to Devin, "Happy birthday" to Stefan and "See you later" to Mrs O'Donnell. Devin, Josiah and Aden iced and decorated biscuits with Leanne. Mrs O'Donnell had made lots of popcorn. It was yummy!!!

We hope everyone has a safe and happy holiday. Mrs Bennington will be teaching Room 3 next term and is already planning lots of exciting things to learn!

See you in two weeks!!!

Colour My World!

We have been thinking about music and how it makes us feel. 

We have listened to some  music  and we drew lines to show how relaxing and calm it was. 

Then we chose colours that matched how we felt. 

We tried to blend the edges where the two colours met.

Have a look at our blended blob shapes.

Responding to Music

We listened to a piece of music called 'Koromiko'. 

It was very gentle and we could hear birds in it. We could hear blocks tapping and guitars and drums. It reminded us of a walk in the forest. 

We painted some pictures using some different brush techniques. We dabbed on blue and green for the background. We used brush strokes for the solid tree trunks. We used little sticks to scratch on the trunks to look like bark. We used coloured wool to make the tree tops look soft and bushy. We added little creatures in pastel. 

We think our pictures look like the music sounded - a calming walk through the forest. Take a look.