Room 20 2015: March 2015

On Friday 6 March we invited our parents and grandparents to come and have lunch with us, visit our room and to share with them what we have been doing in our classroom - as well as to have some fun!

We had a great time. We showed our identity and culture work.

Our Art: we drew pictures of ourselves and thought about shapes and patterns. Then, we used blending to create different shades for our skin colour. We took photos of our eyes and ears. Lastly, we found words that represented our identities.

We are proud of our art it is unique. We all have our own identity!

We also shared about our own families and identities. We drew enlarged maps of New Zealand we were able to show where our families come from using mapping skills.

Our parents looked at our other work and we had fun playing identity bingo with them and getting to know each other.

At the end of the day we joined the rest of Te Henga team and played tug o war and north, south, east, west.

It was great having fun with our families.

We had a great week!

Our focus questions for the week were:

What aspects of my own culture can I describe?

What does culture mean to me?

How am I unique?

What can I find out about culture and heritage?

First, we explored what culture meant to use.
We also looked at some clips that gave us an understanding about culture and explored our New Zealand culture.

Here are some of our thoughts about New Zealand culture: New Zealand flag, Maori culture, 4 square, America's cup, kiwi, kiwifruit, pavlova, summer bbqs, the beach, jandals, buzzy bee, silver fern, forests, mountains, green, ANZAC, Treaty of Waitangi, pohutukawa, sheep, paua, netball, rugby, pipi, weetbix, marmite, the outdoors ...... and the list went on.

We were learning to describe and wrote our own poems to describe an aspect of kiwiana. Here are a few.
Our writing had to include detail, adjectives, adverbs or nouns and similes.
Can you guess what kiwiana we were writing about? (look at the bottom of today's post to see if you are right)

This type of food is as white as snow and is has an awesome glow.

I am clean and wet like some shiny water.

I am silky like the ginormous clouds.

I am soft like some swirly wool of a sheep.

I am delicious like pasta bake.

I am delicate like a glass cup.

I am creamy like some chocolate that has a lot of sugar in it.

I am yummy like pancakes with ice-cream on. It really is yummy!

I am mushy like some soft playdough.

What am I?
By Celine

It’s a fizzy drink with sour stuff in it.

Most popular soft drink in Nz.

It has lemon.

It is tall, brown and skinny like a giraffe.

Very refreshing.

Best drink in Nz.

What am I?

by Jackson

A golden juicy looking fruit.

I get a sharp knife and cut right through the middle.

It has seeds in a swirly spiral.

There is a deep, stiff inner core that is a challenge to cut.

The skin is very thick.

It is furry and round like a soccer ball.

What am I?

By LM

I see birds soaring through the sky.

I can hear the helicopter going tic a tic a.

I feel the air pushing on my face.

I’m doing the best to conquer my fear of height.

I am zooming down on a cord.

The cord is squeezing my feet as I hang.

By Matthew J

We then explored kiwiana through maths.

We decided would like to experience some of our delicious kiwiana food.

Using what we know about money we had to solve a challenge.

Our challenge was to make an item of kiwiana food. This is what we decided we needed to do or know: what the ingredients were, how much to put in, ratios, shopping lists, how much we were going to spend, we needed to know what money is? and prices, and how to cook it.

We each chose a recipe out of the following: ANZAC biscuits, pavlova, hokey pokey and Maori bread.

Challenge: you have to make your kiwiana food. The shop and yourself only have dollars. So you will not be able to get change. How much money will you need to make your recipe?

We came up with a key question we needed to explore in order to solve this. How do we make cents into dollars?

This was a great starter for a workshop. We did a workshop on how to round numbers to the nearest dollar, ten or hundred.

We used the countdown website to find prices for the items we wanted and then rounded those prices to the nearest dollar.

We then decided we needed to use addition strategies to work out the total cost of our classes kiwiana ingredients.

This is one strategy we used. Using place value. First we added the tens. Then we added the ones. Finally, we added our answers total tens and ones together.

This week we have also worked on inferencing. We had to make inferences about the different types of kiwiana we wrote about using the evidence in the writing and our own knowledge.