The Power of Participation

Wow!  What a busy term that was!  This was certainly a term that required lots of 'Participating and Contributing' - one of the Key Competencies in our curriculum.  In terms of performance, we started with speeches, and finished with the production but in between we had sport coaches, swimming, and lots of learning in Maths and Literacy.  Check out what we have been up to!

To end the term we have been doing some 'hands on' maths.  We've been estimating and measuring, using scales and finding weights on boxes.  We learnt that a large yogurt pottle of water weighs about a kilogram, and a paper clip only weighs one gram.  That means it takes ONE THOUSAND paper clips to make the scales balance!  We finished off the term with some delicious baking, putting our weighing skills to good use!  Yummo!

Swimming was another highlight!  Each Monday we hopped on the school bus and headed into Rangiora to develop our swimming skills.  Choosing a buddy to sit next to on the journey was a pretty big decision!  We practiced lots of different skills needed to swim and at the end we all hopped into the deep pool to practice our water safety skills.  This made some of us very nervous, but with some encouragement and a whole lot of courage we found we could do it!  

Sport coaches visit North Loburn every second Wednesday and it is a highlight of the week when they do!  We've enjoyed learning about how to successfully pass, dribble and shoot basketballs and more recently we have been working on Athletics.  Did you know that to successfully sprint you need to 'pick your nose and put it in your pocket'!  (Not really, but thinking about it helps us to get our arms right!).  We've got Athletics next term so we'll be ready to run when it rolls around.  

We worked pretty hard on these fabulous art works.  We'd been busy doing all things 'spotty' as part of our Twister item in the production so Mrs Webb thought we would love to recreate some art based on a Russian artist called Kandinsky.  He was an artist who was really interested in shape and colour.  We made big, bright colourful circles and then very carefully cut slits in them in order to weave some black paper through them.  The under and over when we were weaving was pretty tricky!  They looked like chess boards on the back.  We were so proud of how wonderful they looked that we just had to share them in assembly!

And finally... our production!  Productions only happen every second year, but when they do they are certainly memorable!!  'Yet' was the name and we learnt all about the power that we can find when we use that word at the end of our sentences.  'I can't do this!' becomes 'I can't do this yet!'.  Manuka's item was themed around the board game 'Twister'.  We learnt to twist (it's just like squishing a spider, and drying our back with a towel), developed our singing voices and had such a great time.  For some of us the stage is a fun place to be, and for others it gives us the 'worry tummy'.  Either way, we were proud of the way we listened to advice and feedback, practiced and practiced (and practiced some more) and got better and better with each and every run through.  We were dazzled by lights, amazed by the other classes items and we had smiles a mile wide as our family and friends clapped, hooted and hollered for us.  Check out how wonderful we looked!