Cute.......

Cute baby girl giraffe born at Orana Park today

Punctuation Points

Last week during story writing I introduced a new idea for punctuation.  ( from David Mitchell)
Every time the children use a full stop, comma, capital letter, exclamation mark, question mark and speech mark correctly in their stories they receive points.
Last weeks TOP 6 PUNCTUATION POINTS  leaders are:

Gemma
Catlin
Hamish
Kate
Maddie
Nivae
Liam

Well done :)

Interface Magazine Awards 2012

The Interface Magazine Awards were announced today - Huge congratulations to all the winners, such great work and ideas in your blogs and tweets. 
Make sure you have a look at their work.

 SURPRISE 
- we are runners up in the Best Class Blog category :) :)  Big thank you to everyone who voted for us.

V8 Cars come to Halswell School

Today when we got back from swimming we had a visit from V8 cars and their drivers . They all introduced themselves and them we got to meet them and get their signatures. We looked at their cars, most of them had safety bars and different types of seatbelts. We thought the cars were  - fantastic, one was on olden days car, we would like to drive one.
Taffy and Cooper.

Weekly round up

By Nivae, Jack and Maddie.
Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. This week we have been doing-

• swimming every day
• we did a story about what we saw when we suddenly turned around
• we had some V8 cars come to our school. We got posters and a colouring competition. Me Topham is going to be racing in one of the cars!!! How do you think he will go?
• we hit 30, 000 on our blog
• South Learning Centre came to work with us
• our jump jammers are in a competition tomorrow - good luck!!!
• we found out today we are the runners up in the Interface Magazine Best Class Blog Competition.

Christchurch South Library Visit

Like many places around Christchurch, the Christchurch South Library has been closed due to earthquake damage. While closed, the lovely people there decided to do an outreach programme for schools.
On Tuesday we had a visit from them. Our class and another class had the opportunity to use their ipads and use the app puppet pals.
First we chose either - The Wonkey Donkey or The Red Tree story and then interviewed each other using the app. It was heaps of fun.
Thank you South Learning Centre.

Future Olympian Swimmers

Swimming

This is our second week of swimming, had fun taking photos with the ipad and then adding frames around them.

The Christchurch Star ,Moon Landing Souvenir from 1969

Phases of the moon - oreo cookie style !

Last Wednesday we made the phases of the moon out of Oreo cookies.
The moon has 8 phases, - new moon, waxing crescent moon, first quarter moon, waxing gibbous moon, full moon, waning gibbous moon, last quarter, waning crescent moon.

To make Oreo moons we had to twist the cookies so they came apart into 2 pieces , then we looked carefully at the diagrams and used spoons and knives to scrape away the cream / icing.
we put them in order on the paper plates and labeled the moons. 
Then Maia took a photo of our work then............we ate all the moons!!! - yum





Oreo moons on PhotoPeach

Eclipse

Today we were extremely lucky to be able to watch some parts of the eclipse. Luckily we had special glasses so our eyes wouldn't get damaged.
It was awesome because it changed to different shades of colours - red, yellow, orange.
Have a look at this link to some amazing photos.

Eclipse

Message from Katherine Applegate, author of "The One and Only Ivan"

Last term when we finished reading "The One and Only Ivan" we emailed the author - Katherine Applegate to tell her how much we loved her book. We also asked her a few questions. Today we got a reply from her. it was very exciting getting a reply as we know she is very busy.

Here is the reply.........

Hello to beautiful New Zealand, and thanks for your note. Your questions were :

> How long did it take you to write the story?        
Two or three months plus the publishing cycle

> Did you go and study how gorillas behaved?    
I read a lot of books, plus a zoo visit

> How did you know about Ivan?                           
 Can't quite remember .. a news story I think

> Did you ever go and see Ivan?                            
Yes .. my daughter Julia and I went to see him

Thanks again for writing to me.
Katherine Applegate

Custom Glitter Text

Made Awards

Congratulations to all the winners in the MADE awards. We watched some of the clips today - they are amazing.

Click HERE to view the winners in all the categories.

Remember swimming starts tomorrow. Make sure you have everything named.
We leave school at 10.45 and return 11.45

Week four

This week we have done...

• buddies - played hop scotch
• changed desks
• went to the library
• found out some things about the moon
• we found out about our movie awards
• did some of our Andy Worhol art work
• The Art Gallery lady came out to take us for a lesson - we drew some native birds 
• we had music and sang some Mary Poppins songs.
• we skyped our buddies in Melbourne, Australia

From Molly and Ella

MADE Awards

Good luck to all the finalists in the MADE Awards tonight.

Fingers crossed for our year 4 group with their entry in the Year 4 -6 documentary section - topic Ancient Greece.