Holiday Writing

Welcome back to Term 2. The Trailblazers have had an enthusiastic start with some great writing all about our holidays. We are sharing our favourite part of our holiday in a format called 'A Moment in Time'. It involves us writing eight sentences that start with 'I saw', 'I felt', 'I heard' and 'I wondered'. Our learning intentions are to write using WOW words and to use 'show not tell'. Here are a few snippets from some of the students:

"I heard the quad's powerful engine grumbling like a dog that hasn't had  enough to eat." By Isaac

"I felt the vibration tingle up my feet when I dropped it." By Jack

"I also saw the glazing red fire that was spreading across the jungle." By Yara

"I felt the rough rope clenched in my hand." By Sakura.

Kiwiana Art

We have been doing some amazing Art with Mrs Hickey this term. We have linked it to our topic of 'Kiwiana' by creating some 'tiles' based around iconic New Zealand images. We have pictures of the red band gumboot, pohutukawa and kowhai flowers, the humble pineapple lump through to the buzzy bee.

The creation of the tiles has been a gradual, layered process. We started by drawing the outline in pencil, using bold shapes. The next step was to use a mixture of black paint and PVA glue mixed up in sauce bottles to draw over the pencil lines. This was a lot more difficult than we first thought. There was a real 'art' to get the thickness of the line right and to make sure that we didn't smudge any of the lines. After this had dried, we then used water based paint to paint between our raised black lines. Only once the paint was dry could we then had the finishing touches of oil pastels to give our paintings some highlights, lowlights and shadows.

The finished products look amazing, take a look for yourself!

The 'Trailblazers' Classroom

The start of this year has seen the re-naming of the classrooms. Room 1 is now the 'Trailblazers' classroom. We are going to spend some time discussing what this means, what our classroom motto of 'Learning isn't a spectator sport' means and what this will look like in the classroom. We have some amazing new signs up around the school introducing the classrooms and it lists some of the things you will see us doing and learning about in our classrooms.