Top Team

What a fabulous afternoon everyone has had at Top Team. They'll be tired tonight! Great teamwork, persistence and an apparent love of water from Room 19ers...

What we got up to today...

Well done to everyone who competed at Zone Athletics today. Even if your placing was not quite what you wished for, giving it your best shot was the most important thing. Congratulations if you were one of the 32 people who qualified for the Canterbury Tournament to be held in Ashburton on Wednesday December 5th.

Those of us who remained at school worked on a cartoon enlargement project, using a grid. Precision and accuracy lead to impressive results for many.

Joe's finished result. He started with a small 5cm square cartoon from the paper.

One of the Family

Yesterday the RSPCA and Norm Hewitt brought their One of the Family presentation to school. The presentation shared Norm's journey through life and how he overcame adversity when he was young to achieve success. There was a strong message of breaking the cycle of domestic violence. Along the way we laughed, we cried and we laughed some more ... for 90 minutes! He even managed to teach Mr Rodger and Mrs Inwood some snazzy dance moves! Check them out on You Tube.

Athletics

We had a fabulous athletics day, lots of wonderful performances. Have just looked through the videos of sprint finals, technology is a wonderful thing; a number of the places have now been corrected! Photos below of Room 19 in action at high jump and sprints.

Grace takes flight

12 years girls sprint start.

12 year old boys take off.

Go Sam!

Latham powers towards the finish line.

Arms give extra lift.

Thomas takes off in the staff / student relay, won by the student teachers. Beckenham staff came 4th!

Sabine clears another jump.

Impressive style Jess.

Latham flies!

And the front on view.

Robotics

Today we started our science interchange programme. First up robotics. Mission 1 was to design a robot to carry Woof through a minefield, following the mine-free path, until he was safely home. We used remote control to manoeuvre our robots. We learnt a lot about putting a robot together, some still need fine tuning ... then it's Mission 2; 'Put on at brakes!'

Woof makes it safely through the minefield thanks to the great robot design and control of his engineers.





Nearly there!
 

Concept designs for our clocks.

This term we are making papier mache clocks. Today we started the process by coming up with some concepts. Creativity was bouncing around the room. There is a week to mull over and keep dreaming up design ideas. Next Wednesday we'll be finalising our designs.

Click on the 'Reminders' tab for term 4 messages.

Congratulations

A big well done to Joe, Grace and Danielle for their superb speech deliveries today. Danielle was our star, taking our first place for 2012. A very entertaining speech that she is not going to put into action in the classroom! Topic: Procrastination, a word that we can all spell now, thanks to Danielle :-)

Mrs Radcliffe, who helped judge the speeches, with the three proud placegetters.

Big Day!

I was so proud of our Room 19ers today. We started the day with our 10 speech finalists each sharing 30 secs of their speech to impress the judges (the rest of the class). We would of have been happy for any of them to represent our class; well done and good luck to Joe, Danielle and Grace. Overall the standard of speeches this year was impressive, lots of great content and confident presentations. Well done everyone.

Next up was House Picnic. The House Captains and their helpers did a superb job of organising games and motivating and directing the younger children.

We finished with the finals of the talent quest - a big afternoon of performance. Well done Sabine, Briana, Grace, Teille and Ruby. You were all gorgeous and your talent shone.

One very proud teacher signing off!

 

Visitors from Chile

Today we got the chance to chat with students from Chile in our Spanish class. They shared a couple of dances from their country and Grace demonstrated the long poi on our behalf. After that we went outside to ask questions and compare life in our countries. They eat dinner at 10pm!

Spellathon Time

By now spellathon cards should be at home and you should be underway learning words and gathering sponsors. Here's a suggestion for pain free and effective 'word - learning'.

Focus on three words per day. Put the visualisation technique into action.

1.Write the word out in three colour blocks ... gua ran tee
2. Say the word phonetically (how the letters sound) goo-a-ran-tee
3. Take a 'photo' of the word in your mind ... close your eyes.
4. With your eyes closed read out what you see in your mind letter by letter, forwards, then try it backwards.
5. Cover the word, open your eyes and write the word.
6. Check it.

We've been doing this at home for two nights now with Tim. 48 hours after learning the words (and they're tricky ones), he can recall them perfectly ... and the learning is a happy time!

Happy spelling :-)

i-touches are go!

We are making the most of the new i-touches that were purchased in the last school holidays. The school has 3 sets of 10, one set of which is housed in our classroom:-) Recently we have been using these to...

research about a year in the history of the modern Olympics ...

track our progress at the Games using the 'London 2012' app ...

and explore apps for the juniors with our buddies.

Well done to Briana, Oscar and Henry 8 (reserve) who are off to compete in the teams competition for Cantamath next Wednesday afternoon.

Today we selected entries for the Cantamath display competition. Room 19 really raised the bar with a number of very impressive creations. Well done to Danielle, Briana, Oscar, Andrew, Conan, Grace, Brendon and Thomas.

A tasty lesson in win win...

We wrapped up our win-win lessons today by discussing the 'tumor twins', competing and comparing. We talked about what made competition healthy, and how when winning at all costs becomes the focus, competition can become dark and dangerous. Comparing our own performances is a good thing, but comparing ourselves to others can lead to a number of problems. These ideas had nice links to the Olympics.

However the highlight of the afternoon was the creation of our win-win pizza. By considering everyone's preferences and doing a bit of maths, we created a pizza to keep everyone happy:-)

Poets in the making

This week we started exploring the poets within! Our first creation is a poem based a recipe, designed to make someone angry. Here are a few of the 'dishes' that have been created...

One beautiful platter of fishing clothes doused in a spicy dip of scariness, all delicately laid on some dirty school uniform.

A piping hot plate of tangy old fashioned unhelpfulness marinated in a delicious not listening sauce, this is a favourite to everyone (except Mums!)

A crisp argument heated just to the right temperature between right and wrong.Served with a sprinkling of ‘I’m right’.

An intriguing cocktail of authentic not as smart as you and distinctive being wrong for the perfect accompaniment to a delicious dinner.

A roasted trio of fighting, dirty clothes and a pile of week old laundry, blended together to make a symphony of flavours. On top of a big fat chunky cut of, it’s her turn to set the table, finally topped off with a creamy dolloping of talking back.

An intriguing blend of a crisp tardiness seasoned with a pinch of homework excuses finished off with a glazed homework excuse .

Learning about win win...

Today we did an interesting activity with a 5 X 5 grid, some 'x's and 'o's and two groups of students. The goal was the earn a lollies by placing 4 symbols in a row on the grid. Ask your children what they learnt from this activity!

One round of the activity nearly ended in no sweets being earned. In another round one group earned 2 each. The last round needed some teacher intervention to encourage the groups to focus on the objective (getting lollies) rather than making the other group get none. We worked out that by helping each other every participant could have got 2 or 3 lollies each ... TEAMWORK RULES:-)

Toys are go!

We've done it! Books are published, cards have been created and the final stitch has been sewn. Come and see our wonderful display in the Hall on Tuesday and Wednesday this week.