Our Success Tree

Challenge 2012

Welcome to Week 1 in Room 3



This year our theme is Challenge.  We have a Tree of Success in Room 3.

When each child succeeds in a challenge in reading, maths, writing etc, they will get a new leaf (a cut out of their handprint with their own pattern on it) on the tree.  So keep an eye on our tree as the leaves start to appear, by the end of the year our tree is going to be pretty full.

You will notice the mushrooms under our tree. 

These are some of the class rules that we have agreed upon.

The blue circles are the Key Competencies.

(the nutrients for our learning)

These involve things like learning to share, play fair, use thinking skills, managing ourselves and being responsible for our own learning etc.

We also have Golden Time for the Pounamu Syndicate in 2012. 

This is a syndicate reward programme.  Each child has a bug with their name on it. 

This bug will climb the flower when work is completed and rules are followed. 

If the bug reaches the top by Friday afternoon, then children get to participate in Golden Time - games and activities.

We have completed our class School Bus this week.  This is our 'arriving' school bus and later in the year we will make a 'leaving' school bus to show the difference a year has made.

Literacy in Week 1

We have been learning the letter 'S' this week, the chunk 'at', the blend 'sh'. 

Some of the 'at' words we brainstormed this week include cat, hat, bat, sat, mat.

We read about Fat Cat who sat on the mat.  He had a challenge of his own. 

Everyone thought he was being lazy and crazy, until we got to the end of the book

 and found out why he was sitting on his mat.

We have found lots of words and pictures of things that start with the letter S. 

We have put these in our alphabet book in our library corner.

We also read a story about Incy Wincy Spider and the challenges he has faced trying to stay at the top of the spout.  Incy Wincy was pretty persistent and it paid off in the end. 

He kept trying and, in the end, found the best way to climb back up the spout.

Finally check out our Maths page.  We have been learning about Statistics. 

Our key words this week have been Pictograph (or Pictogram), information and pictures, least popular and most popular.  Children should be able to tell you that we put information in a pictograph to help us see that information quickly and easily.