Recording our working-out...

After we had used materials to investigate word problems in Maths, we recorded our findings by using drawings, numbers and words.  Here are some examples of what we did.

Solving Maths Word Problems

During Term 4 we will be very busy solving problems... of the Maths kind!  This week we have learnt to do lots of new things to help us to do this.  Here are some of them:

*  solving problems by using materials like counters, multi-link,
   lolly sticks and teddy bears    
*  recording how we work things out, using drawings, words
   and number sentences     
*  writing our own word problems
*  identifying maths language in word problems

This is how we started at the beginning of the week with materials.

Welcome to Term 4!

Here we are at the end of the first week of the final term! With our focus on knowing about, and better understanding of how we as learners tick, check out our new Topic wall in Room 10!

Crafty Crafting...

This week we spent time crafting a piece of work of our choice. 

Each of us chose one of our favourite pieces of free choice writing to work on and make it better.

First we had to check that our sentences made sense.  Then we corrected punctuation and spelling to make our sentences make even better sense.  After that we made changes to words and sentences to improve the content of our writing.

Finally we re-drafted... that means we copied out all our changes to make our best piece.

See the concentration on our faces as we work hard to improve our work...

Visit from Lyn Kriegler

This week we were lucky to have a visit from Lyn Kriegler who is an author and an illustrator. She has produced over 150 books!  WOW!  She talked to us about how she first started to write stories when she was a little girl, and she showed us how she made her first story books from one piece of paper.  With a bit of clever cutting she could show her story on separate pages... and on one big page!

Lyn also brought her toys and puppets.  She has had some of these since she was a little girl.  Lyn works for part of the year at a school in India.  She leaves her puppets here though because the children are frightened of them!  We loved them... have a look!

Carrying Lyn's things to Room 8.

We decided to have a go at writing our own little books.  It was the perfect way to show the research we had done on SNAKES this week as part of our READING work.

We started with a BIG BOOK called SNAKES and we first recorded what we knew about snakes BEFORE we even read the book.  (This is called our PRIOR KNOWLEDGE).  We knew lots... considering there are no snakes in New Zealand!  Miss Coverdale was very impressed!  Then we read the book.  It's a story, not a non-fiction book but there was quite a lot of information about snakes.  After that we recorded our new information and then worked out what we knew at the end of our reading, that we didn't know at the beginning.

On Wednesday we did some more research about snakes on the laptops and iPads.  We found lots of new facts to add to what we already knew.

Our little books contain information about snakes.  We have drawn pictures and written sentences.

Have a look at some of our books below.  We didn't practise anything before we did these. These are our first drafts.  Have a look.