Solo Taxonomy

The Middle team have designed some new symbols to help with our learning and thinking using SOLO taxonomy.

Week 2 Term 3

Welcome to Week 2 Term 3

Thank you to the parents who came to visit the Middle School on Friday. It was a great opportunity to have a look across the 4 classrooms. 

We have begun our learning about Cycles, and the students have been inquiring into what they already know about Cycles.   We are going to begin our Inquiry into Time,  and how things stay the same or change over time. 

Reports went out last week, and a reminder that the students portfolios are their blogs.  

The NED Show is on Tuesday. A Leaflet came home about this on Thursday. Yo-yos are being sold at the office as part of the NED Show.

"Called to serve like Jesus" 

As part of our RE learning we have been writing prayer cards in class. These prayers are to be printed and laminated. We are going to hand these prayers to parishioners after mass this coming Sunday.
Sunday 2nd August, 10am, St Mary's Church.
We would like as many of the middle school children who can attend mass On Sunday, so that they can help hand out their prayer cards. Thank you.

This week
MONDAY 27TH JULY. 

MAORI LANGUAGE WEEK
10.30pm Church Choir Room 15
3.00pm - 6.00pm Parent Interviews

TUESDAY 28TH JULY
ICAS English
9.00am The NED show
3.00pm - 6.00pm Parent Interviews

WEDNESDAY 29TH JULY
8.45am Singing Practice.
Library
7.00pm PTA AGM Staff room. All welcome.

FRIDAY 31ST JULY
12.30pm Pasifika group meet in Room 15
2.10pm Assembly

Cycles

Created with Padlet

We have begun our new Concept on Cycles. We worked together yesterday in groups to think about what we already knew about Cycles. Today we put some of our ideas together on a Padlet. Here is our collaborative ideas about What we know about Cycles before we start our learning.

Storybird

Here is a story that Charlotte has written, published and posted to her blog.

Term 3

Welcome back to school, we have a Teacher Only Day on Monday, so I am looking forward to seeing everyone back at school on Tuesday. I hope you  have all had a great holiday and are well rested. 

Hopefully everyone has been doing lots of reading and filled in their Holiday Reading Logs. We want to have 100% of our class bring their reading log back to school.

This week

Monday         Teacher Only Day

Tuesday         First Day Back

Wednesday    Singing, Library, Reports out Today 

Over the last few weeks we have been making a Kea. We have learnt how to Needle Felt- A huge Thank you to Lou Couch for organising supplies and coming in to teach us and help us make the Kea.  Also thanks to Claudine Bradley and Alex for assisting us, and the Agrodome for donating some of the supplies. 

 The children did a great job, the Kea looks fantastic.

On the last day of Term 2 we were very lucky to have Bishop Steve visit us.  

Here are some photos of him in our room and a video of him at our school.

Mandarin

We have really enjoyed having Jack in our class teaching us Mandarin. Today, we did a revision of some of the things we have learnt over the term.

Garden Bird Survey

Landcare Research, Forest and Bird, the Ornithological Society and Fairfax Media are asking for help again this year in spotting birds in New Zealand gardens. 

Today we looked at the NZ Garden Bird Survey. We discussed why we should count birds in our gardens, and what information it would provide and why this may be important. 
We had some really good reasoning behind why we should be counting the birds we see in our gardens.

We looked at the Garden Bird Survey site and categorised the birds shown into Native and Introduced species. 
We then chose the logo we liked best as part of their Choose a Logo.  We had to rank the logos in the order we liked the best and explain why we liked one the most, and why we disliked our least favourite. 
I was impressed with the reasons the students gave for their choice of logo. 

Image A

Image B

Image C

Image D

Image E

Image F

Image G

Image H

We have until Sunday to take part in the survey- it would be great if everyone could spend an hour doing this sometime this week. It would be a good activity for the first weekend of the holidays.
The survey results can be submitted online or on paper.
Looking at last years results not many people (I think only 5) participated in Rotorua so it would be great to see if we could get more people involved, and it fits in perfectly with our learning this term.
Here is the link to the site. http://www.landcareresearch.co.nz/science/plants-animals-fungi/animals/birds/garden-bird-surveys

Here is last years results of the birds counted in the survey.