Letter Formation Time

Every week we have a few letter formation sessions and we learn what sound the specific letter makes and how we write its letter appropriately. This week we learnt about a 'g' and a 'q'. The children are developing understanding about how the letter formation session runs, and now are able to give me many ideas about the words that start with the specific sounds we are learning about. 

Each child has a mini whiteboard that they write on, and they really enjoy this process. I also use a horse puppet called Harry and they love seeing Harry and doing the letter formation with Harry together.

Sunflower art

This week, we have been learning about sunflowers. We have found very tall sunflowers in the school garden too. We talked about how a sunflower grows and one of the children talked about how a puhutekawa tree grows from a tree needing the sun and water. As we drew a picture of a sunflower, we talked about the parts of the sunflower, petals, stem, roots, seeds. 

This was process art where there are quite a few steps in order to create the art. The fist step was drawing the sunflower with a pencil. The next was to use a bottle of the mixture (glue and black paint) to trace the pencil line. This was hugely challenging as it was quite big to hold for the children, but they did an amazing job of staying focused, persevering through difficulties, and achieving their goals. One of the girls said "My hand is so sore from squeezing!" 

We waited overnight for the glue to dry and the next day, moved on to painting with dye.

This was a creative process. Wonderful bright colours. They chose to paint the sunflower and its backgrounds.

Amazing sunflower art. Each of them is very unique. What a fantastic job everyone did!

Learning about Gateway

This week, we have learnt about the Gateway of Hamilton East School. Many children are very familiar with the gateway and know where this is located. In order for us to develop the understanding about the gateway, we first went to see this awesome gateway! 

The children felt the carving with their hands, some of them even put their cheeks onto the carving. They talked about what they could see... the lizard, the fantail, the big faces... 

The next day, the children drew the pictures of the gateway from memory. I could see that they were helping to do this together. 

In the class, we talked about what each symbol represented. There are Hotumane and Mahehe. Hotumane is watching the people go through the gate. There are carving that represented boy students and girl students as well as the teachers. It also had Waikato River and Tāniwha which we were very familiar about as we went on a boat trip and learnt about tāniwha recently.

We went to do some sketching at the gateway. We also did some art creating our own gateway which will be coming soon! 

Week 4: Boat trip

18th, February, 2019 

We went on the boat trip at Waikato river. The children were so excited about this trip and we were talking about what we would see at the river. 

We saw Fairfield Bridge. 

 Some children got to be the captain of the boat!

We saw the museum too.