Meeting with our MP Michael

On Friday 9th April, we had a special visit from Michael Wood, our local Member of Parliament (MP) for Puketāpapa (Mt Roskill). Michael came to the Middle School to talk to us about what his job is. He shared lots of different ideas about government, from how we vote, where he works in Wellington, to what he does for a job. 

Michael Wood showing us where he works in the Beehive

Michael Wood's office is on the bottom level and Jacinda Ardern's is on the top

We got a chance to ask him questions after each picture that he shared with us. Lots of us wanted to know if he works with Jacinda Ardern, our Prime Minister and where his office is in the Beehive. We loved learning about our government in Aotearoa. 

Thanks for reading our blog! I wonder if you have ever had any questions for your MP? What would you ask them if they came to your class?

Duffy Stuffy

 Over the past few weeks we have had some Duffy visitors...

Our Duffy Assembly was in Week 9. Lisa Allen, a children's book illustrator, came to see us and talk about her work. She brought in some copies of picture books with her art in as well as some examples of her illustrations to show us. She also showed us her workbook full of collected ideas and drawings, explaining how she doesn't throw away her mistakes as these can often help give her ideas for future projects.

Lisa showing some of her illustrations

Students with Duffy Certificates

Then in Week 10 the school watched the Duffy Theatre. They presented their latest show which was set during 2020's COVID lockdown. The story was about Duffy and his sister, Scruffy, who were staying with their aunty on a farm. In amongst the farm work, frustration with online learning, missing reading actual books, and a hunt for a lost chicken, Duffy fell down a hole and discovered some moa bones. With some audience assistance to pull him out of the hole, Duffy was rescued and could share his amazing find. One new aspect of the show was revealing the props usually used backstage and how sound effects were made with different objects they had collected. We were encouraged to experiment with making different sounds from objects in our homes and having a go at putting on plays too. 

With all of this talk about books it has me wondering...

what are some of your favourite books to read? 

Who are your favourite authors and illustrators? 

Maybe you could let us know in a comment to this post below... 

Week 9 - Exercise and Sport Blog Ponder

 This week, some of our classes are focusing on sport, fitness and exercise for our T-shaped literacy.  We will be reading stories are about these topics. We will use the ideas we read about to help us with our descriptive writing.  We would love to get some of your ideas and thoughts about exercise because this will help us out too.  Could you respond to our blog ponder by adding your positive, thoughtful and helpful ideas in the comment section below? We would really appreciate it.

Thanks for reading, blog you later!

Fantastic Family Fun Day

Family Fun Day, yay hey! 

On Friday March 19th we had our Family Fun Day at Waikōwhai Primary. It was a free day with lots of different activities for us and our families. We had to wear the colours of our houses. There was a wheels zone, our school pool, bouncy castles and a water slide. One of the bouncy castles was an obstacle course where we got to race our friends and run, climb and crawl through tunnels, rock walls and slides. At lunchtime we had sausages and ice blocks, as well as lots of different treats made by our families. 

Each of us in Mokoroa enjoyed different parts of the day and we loved the chance to try out all the different activities. Check out some of the photos from our day!

Thank you for reading our blog, we can't wait for next year!

Writing - Poetry Language Features

We are learning to identify how authors use language features to make their writing exciting for their readers.  

We used this poem from the School Journal to learn about types of words (nouns, verbs and adjectives)  and investigate descriptive language.

Then our writing challenge was to use this poem to write our own 5 sentence poem using two or three of the language features we discovered. Kaiwhare wrote poems about the sea and Mokoroa wrote poems about the sun.

Here is the start of the class poem we crafted together in Kaiwhare.

Have a look at the amazing poems we wrote:

Reading and Summarising - How we keep safe in water

 Last week, we read stories about being safe around water as our Reading theme.  Our challenge was to find the main ideas in the stories we read to see if we could learn new ideas about how we can be safe around water or what we should do to be safe around water.  

We analysed and summarised ideas with our reading groups.  To do this we read and talked about

• the good things the characters in our stories did. 
• the not so safe things that they did.
• what we thought about the actions of the characters in the story. 

To show our thinking, we had the chance to use our new digital skills to make a poster to show some different ways that we can be safe around water using our new understanding.  Have a look at some of our DLO (digital learning objects) below.

We would appreciate some positive, thoughtful and helpful feedback about what we have created. Thanks for reading!

Netball Skills

This term we have been learning skills to help us improve at netball.

Over the past few weeks we have learnt about...

•  passing (chest passes, bounce passes and high passes)

• pivoting on one foot, running and stopping

• and dodging

We are looking forward to see what is in store for us during the rest of the sessions with our two coaches.