A Beautiful Friendship!

Music and Art are fantastic friends. This week we have been exploring Wassily Kandinsky who is known as the painter of sound and vision. We used Chrome Music Lab to experiment with our own images as music on our chromebooks.

Connor was our expert and he showed us the programme and how it works. Thanks Connor! It was our turn next and we got the chance to 'experiment' with different images and the sounds they made. Then we came back together as a class to share our findings. It was great being able to see and hear what everyone had learnt. Next we went away again to create our own masterpiece now that we had more 'expert' knowledge. We had a lot of fun and we were proud of our finished pieces. Mine is below and all the students have posted their masterpieces on their individual blogs so make sure to check them out.

It's great being back :)

I know it will come as no surprise that we are happy to be back at school. Our class have quickly adapted to the changes we made to our classroom and daily routine and have been absolute YMS HEROes.

We have had a number of children still working from home and we have been able to use Google Meet so that they are part of the work, instructions and messages that we give even though they are not physically in the class with us.

We have a new shared book and as you can see from our class website we had a choice of what that book would be. When all the votes had been counted, we chose The Butterfly Lion by Michael Morpurgo. So far we have laughed, we have compared lives and then today we were upset at what had happened We are loving our choice of book. You too can hear the story as we read it aloud on our class website under shared story.

In Maths Mrs Taylor's teams combined Maths and Art on Friday and we looked at M.C Escher's work. This was building on our 'Learning from Home' work that we were doing while we were on lockdown.  During lockdown we looked at Paul Klee and Mondrian. Escher uses tessellation to create his pieces.We have really enjoyed creating our own masterpiece inspired by M.C Escher's work.  Check out our work. We are not finished yet but you can see the effect of our town terrific tessellations.

Well we hope you have all enjoyed being back at school. What did you miss most about school?

School is Re-Opening!!

Hi everyone,

Like lots of people, we have been getting ready to re-open our classroom on Monday 18th May. It's no
secret that Ms Dods and I were excited to hear that we were moving from Level 3 to Level 2 and that
schools could re-open. We have loved spending time with our class in the mornings on our hangouts and
seeing all their awesome work, but we are really really happy that we will be back in the classroom with all our fabulous students. We have missed spending our days with them.

With the level 2 restrictions, we have had to make some changes to our classroom routines. We now
have two doors working and we will enter through the door we would normally use and then when we
leave the classroom we go out the door on the right. There are signs on the door to help us remember to
do this. The two doors are separated by our cubbies.  Everytime we enter or exit the classroom, we need
to remember to sanitize our hands with anti bac. We have placed bottles of this near the two doors on the
drink bottle table. Easy right?

The next change we have had to make is that you won't be able to choose spaces in the classroom to sit
and work. You all have your own spot and that is where you will sit for all of the sessions. We have done
this so that you are all spaced out and not too close to other students. We have placed your red cubbies in your spot too. Your red cubbies not only have all your pencil cases, mini whiteboard and headphones
but it also has all of your books and scissors for you to use as well. This is so there doesn't have to be
a lot of moving around to get the resources you need.

Many of us will also be keeping our bags at our spots too. This will either be on the back of a chair or
under a seat or table. This will mean we won't have to stand around waiting for others to get things out
of their bags or to put things away. Our drink bottles will stay in our bags too.

We've made this video to show you the main changes. I think you'll see that our classroom is still mostly
the same place you left it around 7 weeks ago. It was a safe fun place then and it will continue to be that
now.

Of course one of the biggest things we can all do to keep ourselves safe is to regularly wash and/or
regularly sanitize our hands. We've spoken about this when we come in and out of the classroom but
this will also happen throughout the day too, particularly around morning tea and lunch. It will also
happen when you walk through the school gates in the morning as well. 

I know many of you have asked about the playground and the good news is that our playground is open.
Over the past weeks you will have heard the term 'social distancing' or 'physical distancing' and this is
something that you will hear at school too. We will all be working together as one team to not be too
close to each other in the classroom or the playground. We know that you will come up with some
awesome games that take this into account.

So there you have it. In 4 more sleeps we will be back together in our classroom again. We can't wait!!
What have you missed about school since we've been in lockdown?

Wonderful!

Hi everyone and welcome back to another week of our wonderful learning at home. You maybe wondering how we have been doing this so today let's look at this.

We have been using google meet to get together each morning. This has been like our carpet session where we find out what is happening each day, celebrate our successes and look at what challenges we had yesterday. It has been fun catching up with each other this way. Here we are this morning. We were missing some of our students today but we hope they'll be back with us tomorrow.

After our hangout we then make a start on our Reading, Writing and Maths work. This has not been to difficult as we would do this if we were at school too. We go to the class website and look at our group planning docs to see what to do.  Easy! It's easy because this is what we would do at school too. Our teachers leave us videos that explains our learning and we can watch these as many times as we like. If we have any questions or are unsure of anything we can email our teachers or leave a comment in our workbooks. Our teachers check these all the time and comment on what we have done. 

We also have some great activities/competitions that we can choose to do after we have finished our Reading, Writing and Maths each day. This week we have been taking part in the Sports Lockdown Championship. We have had to compete in events at home and then share videos and photos of us doing the events. This weeks events were vacuuming, emptying the dishwasher, star jumps, press ups, tidying our rooms and setting the table. 

Well there you have it. That's how we've been learning and working while we have been staying in our bubbles. What have you been doing?