Maths Furniture

In maths we have been designing furniture to build for outside our room.  Students had to research ideas based on a design brief.  They then had to draw scale drawings and build models.  We are in the last phase now as the groups put together presentations to convince everyone else their design is the best idea.  We are hoping to build one of the designs for real.

Fun Run

Last Wednesday was the Tawa Intermediate Fun Run.  Room 4 chose  "Multiple Births" as our dress up theme for the day.  There was an interesting mix of twins, triplets and quadruplets.  We had great fun but now starts the hard work of collecting the sponsorship we have been promised.

Cricket Skills

For PE we have been working on our cricket skills.  While we have started well we do have a bit more work to do.  Below is a video of us in action.

Drama and Writing

For our writing we are looking at expanding on our ideas by developing moments in time in a story.  Today for drama we did something to build on this by creating freeze frames based on a nursery rhyme.  See if you can guess what nursery rhyme each picture represents.

Group 1 Freeze 1

Group 1 Freeze 2

Group 2

Group 3

Group 4

Drama People Piles

Once a week we go and do some drama in the TIS studio.  At this stage we are just doing simple drama games like wink murder (get your child to explain what the game involves).

People started getting more dramatic when they were killed and even started collapsing on their neighbour.  This gave us the idea of seeing how many people could collapse on top of the each other at the end of the session.  Below are a couple of our better attempts.

Ball Skills

A few times a week Room 4 go outside to work on our ball skills.  The idea is to increase the ball skills of the whole class.  We started with one ball per pair but are now up to two balls per pair.

If you know any drills to help develop the classes' ball skills let Mr O'C know. 

Room 4's School Norms Thinking

The school Norms are the following 5 key words; Protection, Respect, Fairness, Honesty & Caring.  These words underpin how we act and treat each other at Tawa Intermediate.  Room 4 has been exploring what the Norms mean to us and below we present some of our thinking via The Norms Game Show.

Maths Enlargements

One of the first formal bits of work we did in Room 4 was looking at enlargements, particularly what Scale Factors are.  Below are some of the enlargements done by the students.

Ngatitoa Domain Trip

Some highlights from our syndicate trip to Ngatitoa Domain. 

Team Building Hoop Challenge

Each year Mr O'C challenges his class to squeeze the class into as few hula hoops as possible.  Room 4 started by fitting into 5 and then 4 hoops.  They then took on 3 hoops and succeeded, matching the record for this challenge.

This took a lot of team work and it was good to see many people stepping up to help lead the group.

Our Dialogue Covenant

In Room 4 we wanted to sort out how we would speak and listen to each other.  We took the school's Dialogue Covenant and looked at each part to decide what it would mean in our class.

We brainstormed lots of ideas and then in groups we looked at the brainstorms and decided on the key ideas to put under each heading.  These ideas were then presented to the rest of the class to see if they agreed.  Once we all agreed we all signed the Dialogue Covenant to show we were committed to talking and listening to each other in the right way.

Below is what we came up with.

 How Room 4 talks and listens to each other.

1. Make it safe for everyone to share ideas, thoughts, feelings, issues
• Make sure people feels included so they want to contribute
• Don’t discourage people
• Share ideas without fear of being judged

2. Speak with respect
• Talk to people in a nice and respectful way
• You get what you give and give what you get
• Be honest when you speak to others

3. Listen to understand
• Be still, don’t fidget and use the correct body language
• Focus on what people are saying to make it easier to understand

4. Listen without interrupting
• Listen and don’t let other people distract you
• Don’t talk while you’re listening to other people
• If you have a question put your hand up

5. Take time to think
• Think before you speak, particularly about how it might affect others
• Let other people have time to think

6. Remain open to the ideas of others
• Let people share their ideas and think if it would work
• Show you are open by making eye contact
• Look to combine other ideas and opinions

7. Acknowledge the contributions of others
• Praise the ideas of others
• Give positive feedback and don’t put them down

8. Build on the ideas of others
• Add to ideas to make them better
• Edit confusing statements to help the people understand the statement given (paraphrase)

9. Promote and support effective dialogue
• Say things that help and support people’s ideas
• Use words that are understandable
• Remind each other