Crossing the Road...

Beautiful Buddy Reading

There is no question... buddy reading with Tui is a beautiful time!

You can see how well the children engage with the other junior children, how brilliantly they listen as their buddy reads, their amazing friendliness and simply SUPER reading of their books.

I loved watching the wonderful Tui readers help the younger Weka learners as they read their books, showing them the tricky words if they needed assistance. MAGIC!

Running like Frill Necked Lizards

Last week, Jimmy brought in a little model animal. It was a frill-necked lizard.  They live in Australia. We talked for a long time about these lizards, why they have a big frill around their necks, why they are coloured the way they are... lots of things! We also looked at a neat video clip of a frill necked lizard running on youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAo09yYOpCU

We thought it was SO FUNNY. When we went outside, we ran like frill-necked lizards.  It also was SO FUNNY!

One of our Weka students was so taken with the learning about the frill-necked lizard that he went home an made a frill!  I have taken a photo and will upload this week. AWESOME!

Here are some pics of us running like lizards... I wish I had taken video instead!

Nice work!

Each week, during reading, the children have an opportunity to use the whiteboards to draw or write words or letters.

Here's a neat picture from one of our awesome Weka learners.

He was keen for a photo to be taken.  Great stuff!

Hagley Theatre Company

Some members of the Hagley Theatre Company visited us and put on a show. It was a fractured fairy tale called "Little Red Riding Wolf". Weka learners just LOVED the story and laughed throughout.
It was great. Thank you, Hagley Theatre Company!

Go for it!

Followers or visitors of our little blog will be pleased to know that I have looked at the settings and you should now be able to post messages.

Please let me know if there are still problems doing this.

:)

During reading...

One of the activities we do during reading time is 'whiteboards'. Weka learners can choose what they would like to do on the whiteboards - either draw or write letters or words. These boys from the Sharks group drew some pretty impressive pictures and were keen to show them off.  We were keen for them to do that, too. They look really great, boys. Well done!

Fitness

Sometimes for our fitness, we go outside and sometimes... just sometimes, we stay in!

I would like to say that we work hard and keep things very sensible and things like that but... NO - we just run around and have FUN! 

On this day, we were using our balloons. Crazy times! (but good times...)

We grouped our toys...

We brought along our favourite toys and we talked about how they were the same and different. We put them into groups. We found out lots about our groups - for example, there were three dolls and three toys with wheels. There was only one plastic animal and one ball. There were two pillow pets, two snuggles and two teddy bears. When we put them in groups on the mat, we could see our groups easily.
It was fun.

Calendars

I know you have seen them, but here are some pics of us showing our BEAUTIFUL calendars to Sean. He just LOVED them and thought we had done a terrific job of making them. (We should have made a calendar for him, too!)
Weka did put a lot of work into the calendars. We had to paint and cut and glue and laminate, hole punch and thread. It was worth all the hard work, though.  They did look pretty amazing.

                                      

Nathan visits

Our sports co-ordinator is named Nathan. He comes to our school every week and we play games. You can see us playing some games in these photos. We get very hot and bothered but we try hard to listen and follow the rules of the games.

Keryn! Keryn! Take a photo of us!

Ok, then.

Weka Swims...

We have had such a superb summer, so it is little wonder that on lovely hot days Weka class heads out to our school pool for a dip in the cool, fresh water.  Weka children are simply excellent at getting themselves dressed into their togs and getting back into their clothes afterwards. Their water confidence is great also, with much splashing, head ducks, dives and allsorts to be seen during the pool sessions.
Great job, Weka!

What is a Weka?

As part of our routine set ups, we completed a puzzle relay in pairs.  The puzzles had a picture of... (guess what?)... A WEKA! 

After we had finished the puzzles we learned about some of the special qualities of the Weka bird. We learned they care for each other, are brave and try new things. 

We decided we could be like Wekas.

This is us...

Well, this pretty much sums us up in Weka.  Here you can see us eating lunch together, playing with some of the neat things we have in our room and generally having a great time. It's awesome being in Weka.