Christchurch Schools Music Festival

On Wednesday night Mrs Tebbett and I had the pleasure of taking the senior choir to the Horncastle Homes Arena for the Christchurch Schools Music Festival. Our wonderful 9 students sang alongside 1400 other children. It was incredible and the students did a really wonderful job. Well done team!

Spotted in the West Melton Parade!

Athletics Day!

What a great time we had.

Check out the long distance runners:


Long Distance Running on PhotoPeach And Athletics Day. Atheltics Day on PhotoPeach

Recount Writing

Totara is busy learning about recounts at the moment as we have an e-asTTle assessment coming up. We have written a recount, looked at the e-asTTle exemplars, talked about our stories and where they might go and Mrs S has also suggested what our next steps will be for our recounts.

Today we had the Rimu (Year 7/8) students come in and work with us and our recounts. We each shared our recounts and then gave feedback, Two stars and a wish. Totara students did the same for the Rimu students. Their stories were very impressive. You can read them on their class blog here.

After we had all shared our work, we spent time working on an area to improve. Some of us looked at paragraphing, some improving a sentence or changing a word. Tomorrow we are going to work on re-writing our story using these improvements. We can't wait!

While we were all busy doing this. William was outside helping Lisa in the sandpit. You can read about his sandpit adventure here.

Book Character Day and Klimt Art

Friday was a busy day. We celebrated Mrs Noonan and all that she has contributed to the life of our school, particularly the library. As part of the celebration we dressed up as our favourite book characters. Our class was filled with Batman's, a few Amy's from different books, Hermione, Princess Haya ... a whole screed of characters. The whole school popped outside for a parade. Everyone looked pretty amazing.

In the afternoon we created some Klimt art. Klimt was around in the late 1800's/early 1900's. He was from Austria and he one of his most famous paintings is 'The Kiss'.

 We looked at Klimt's Tree of Life painting. We looked at the shape he used and the detail he added to the tree to make it more interesting. It is from Klimt's 'Gold Period'. We painted with Gold Acrylic paint onto sulphate paper. We painted the outline of our tree and then painted in the middle. We added our swirl branches. Once the paint dried we carefully put some white acrylic paint onto the gold for added detail. Lastly we carefully drew around the outside with a black vivid, adding detail to the white shapes if we wanted too. The finally products look amazing. Make sure you pop into class to check them out.

What is white and grey and goes "Cheep, cheep"?

The cutest little visitors to Totara, that's what!

Today Prudence and her mum, Sandra, brought in their 4 little chicks and mum to visit us. The class was very excited and there was a lot of interest in our visitors.

Prudence shared some information about what they have to do to look after them. It was very interesting. Did you know that chicks can get sick from being in water and it can kill them? Prudence has to make sure that they only have a little bit of water at a time so that they don't get sick.

We all wanted to touch them but because mum was a bit protective we couldn't. We all did have a good look though.

Hanging in the class while the roll is called.

 

Look, this one is sitting on his mum's back!

How full is your bucket?

Today we started a new Health topic. It is based around the book 'How full is your bucket?'. We read half of the book, learning about Felix and his invisible bucket. Poor Felix's bucket is drip, drip, dripping due to all the sad things that have happened to him through out the day. Totara class were very thoughtful, sharing insights into why some of the things that were happening to Felix could effect how he is feeling.

We also explored some of the book 'Have you filled your bucket today?'. This book gave us a little more information about these invisible buckets that we have.

Our next job was to create our own buckets. We were able to decorate them anyway we wanted. It was a lot of fun being creative.

If you would like to 'read' the book then you can check it out on you tube.