Term 3 Happenings

Celebrating Special Achievements

We love to celebrate special achievements that happen outside of school. 2 children from Room 1 love to do motor cross and they came to school with some special trophies to show us.


Celebrating Special Achievements in Class

For the first time at Riverlands 2 students from Room 1 got a special acknowledgment from School Bo about their personal points. School Bo is a wonderful learning app on our I.Pads. It has numeracy, spelling and reading problems for students to solve. You can see other children from different schools playing the game too. School Bo sent our 2 students a special golden trophy to share and to celebrate their special achievements. Well done boys!!!
They got presented the trophy and special certificate in Junior Assembly.

 









Environmental Education

This term we have been exploring our school. 
The focus of these activities is to establish connections with the environment and understand our connectedness to it. 
It encourages us to consider the world that we are part of and how we can make decisions to improve the physical and social environment of our school, our community and our world.

Check out some of our activities!
 
 
  

  

Check out this special Environmental Science Project!
A student from Room 8 got special recognition and many awards for her Environmental Project at the Marlborough Science Fair.    





Fun with Science

In Room 1 we have been exploring the 'Nature of Science'. We are making careful observations and having fun with Science. In this experiment we made colour travel and mix. We made our flowers change colour. We watched the changes each day.

   



Loving our Rich Maths Activities

Maths is changing for the better! 
Each day we explore rich math tasks and problem solve. We can see patterns with numbers, use equipment to solve problems, talk about our thinking and then prove our answers.
Recently we have been learning about counting on/back from the highest number, using skip counting and equal sharing.
Check out some of these photos to show how we solved these problems.

 
 

Early Term 2 Happenings

Welcome to Term 2

What have we been up to?

Autumn Day
The weather is starting to get a little bit cooler. 
We had an Autumn Theme Day in Room 1.

We had to complete 5 activities. We could choose what we wanted to do and in any order!
* Twig Weaving
* Lacing with wool around Autumn Shapes
* Leaf painting
* Salt/Nutmeg/Glitter Tracing
* Autumn Poetry
* Autumn Acrostic Poem
* Playing and Raking the leaves outside
* Acorn and Walnut - collecting and making animals

Observing Brookes Butterfly

This is funny!
Brookes father had a wonderful surprise one day. On his hat they spotted a chrysalis growing. 
Brooke brought the hat to school and we did some wonderful observing. 
Over the day it changed a lot and then it started wiggling and wiggling, and out came a wet butterfly.
We observed it shaking its wings to dry them out. 
It was small and then it was big and beautiful when its wings were dry.
Near the end of the day we released the butterfly onto our big swan plants, in the schools garden.



Making and Creating with K.E.G.S

Mrs Heburn has been talking to us about composting and about seasonal vegetables. 
We are learning to use different cooking equipment and exploring different tastes.
Our schools garden is beginning to change and we are beginning to get ready for our schools harvest. 
We have made soup, collected and cracked walnuts, made real fruit juice and made some courgette fritters.



Richmond View Visit

We had Richmond View visit our school to see what we do to be an 'Enviro School'. We meet them in the Opawa Room and greeted them with Toia Mai and our Mihis. 
We showed them what we do at Riverlands School. Our recycling, bokashi buckets, saving electricity and paper and much more. We are working on achieving our 'Silver Award' and we are beginning to explore our school environment and see what we would like to change and how we can help to preserve our future.
Room 9 made some beautiful Putiputi to give to our visitors.
Room 4 showed them how bokashi buckets work.


Making Flowers with Clay

The Cancer Society came and gave our senior class a lesson with how to make daffodils out of clay.
First we drew a big flower shape on paper. Then we pressed a pencil down onto our paper design so it can be seen on the clay.
We cut out our flower shape with a knife.
Then we folded and pressed our daffodil petals to make them stand up and look nice.
Then we created the middle part of the daffodil.
The next day when they were dry we painted them.
We really enjoyed making these to raise money for the Cancer Society on Daffodil Day.
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ANZAC & KEGS

Just before the holidays we had a special school ceremony for ANZAC. We had special guest speakers to explain about the significance of the Poppy and to share what ANZAC is about.
We had the NZ flag at the front and we sang the National Anthem. We listened to the bugle playing the "Last Post". We had a reflection time to think about what happened in the war and to show our respects. A huge thank you to Miss Anderson for organising this special service.



Every Tuesday afternoon we have KEG's with Joanna. KEGS stands for Kids Edible Gardens. Recently we found a huge pumpkin in our garden and we made some yummy pumpkin soup.
We have also had ample feijoas on the ground. We made feijoa crumble. Some of us thought that we wouldn't like it, but we all had a try and it was so yummy and sweet. The crumble on the top looks like our ANZAC biscuits too.

  


Check it out we had a "Fire Engine" at school. Someone got picked up in the morning and brought to school in the fire truck. How lucky!!
This is to finish off our Fire Wise topic.

Easter Time & Our Class Happenings

Our Class Assembly
It was our class assembly with Room 8. We have been practising in the classroom and then went down to the big hall to get ready for the school to watch us.
Room 8 shared some of their work and did a really cool dance, that we all loved.
"We felt nervous, we had fun, its was exciting"
Our class did a waiata. The girls had the poi and the boys did haka actions at the back. Then we did our double rap because we have been learning our doubles and singing them help us to remember them quickly.

These are the words.

"Double, doubles, I can add doubles, its no trouble for me to add double" x2
1+1 = 2
2+2 = 4
3+3 = 6
4+4 = 8
5+5= 10
"Doubles, double, I can add doubles, its no trouble for me to add doubles"
6+6 = 12
7+7 = 14
8+8 = 16
9+9 = 18
10+10 = 20
"Doubles, doubles, I can add doubles, its no trouble for me to add doubles"




Easter Baking

We love creating, making and baking.
mmmmmmm the staff room smelt amazing and made us all hungry. We all made some yummy Easter biscuits. Some looked liked Easter Bunnies, but our ones were round.
We got to put yellow icing on them and EAT them. We showed great table manners, we shared our equipment and showed great 'Connecting Habits'.
Thank you to Mrs McLaren for her extra help to make this happen!





Easter Experiments

What are the parts of an egg?
What comes first, the chicken or the egg?
Do all animals have eggs?
Do all eggs look the same?
What does an egg feel like?
Can you eat slimy eggs?

These were some of our questions when handed an egg to investigate. For Science we are learning to OBSERVE, to talk about what we see, hear, smell and taste. 
We looked at a 'shared book' about eggs and there was an interesting experiment using vinegar and an egg.
* Check out out photos!
* We had so much fun!
* We made a mess!
* We were like Scientists!
* We noticed some change in the eggs!
* We made a hypothesis!

Fun Wet Day at School

Water Fun/Sun Safe

We planned a fun day at school. 
We looked at Sun Safety and what we needed to bring to school so we can stay safe in the sun while doing our activities. 
We were put into groups and went around the stations. The games were "Dry, Dry, Wet" (like duck, duck, goose) and Mrs McLaughlan got really wet!. We also had water relays, bubbles and a big bouncy castle to play on. A huge "thank you" to Mrs Paterson for getting that sorted for us.
After that we had a fire truck to visit us, but it got called away, so we played with the big fire hose and ran around a big obstacle track getting wet.
We all had a fun day and worked together in our groups.

  

Fundamental Skills & Dog Safety

Fundamental Skills at Stadium 2000!

What an excellent week! What a fantastic programme this is!

For 4 days we travelled down to the Stadium to take part in a Fundamental Skills Programme. This involved swimming and water safety skills. We also did ball skills/co-ordination skills and learnt alot about team work. Each day we were tracking our points and a reward was given to a 'player of the day'. At the end of our week the team with the most group points, won a prize.
All our instructors were excellent and are very skilled! 
We all learnt so much!

Look at our pictures!

 

    

Dog Safety

As part of our Safety Inquiry we had a visitor to our school to talk to us about how to stay safe around dogs. We watched a video about 9 safety rules that we need to be aware of when we come across a dog.
We learnt about working dogs in the community and got to practise being safe around a 'real dog'.