Room 1 - Burnside Primary School Canterbury New Zealand

Some of the children have made a newspaper for our classroom. They wrote the articles, took the photographs, typed their work into a special programme called "Pages" after choosing what they would like their newspaper to look like and then delivered it around the classrooms. Senaya, Hadas and Oscar were very proud of their final newspaper and are looking forward to having more children help them with their second edition.

At the end of last term our Junior School performed the story "Where the Wild Things Are" by Maurice Sendak. As part of our investigation into this book we found out about some visual language features. We then used these to make our own slide in a comic. We had to take photos of each other and cut ourselves out using a special "extract" tool on the laptops.

We then chose a background and put ourselves into this background, choosing a speech bubble and words for characters to say.

We learnt a lot about the story and how to use the laptops to make new pictures and to show our own ideas. We think we are pretty fantastic at learning!

Our production was wonderful too..... Here are some of our awesome masks we made!

We have been learning to be cooperative and collaborative in Room 1. We put our new skills to good use recently to weed our butterfly garden and get it ready for the return of the butterflies to lay their eggs. It was a big job and we were very proud of what it looked like at the end and how we had worked together to complete a job.

We even shifted the bricks and remade the butterfly shape. Mrs Williams and her mum have been back to help us and we have now pruned the old wood from the swan plants. They look much better and we are keeping a close eye on them to see if they will grow new parts.

Room 1 have been learning how to look after their butterfly garden and how to get it ready for when the butterflies come back in the spring and summer.

First we took the brown, crunchy seed pods off the swan plants in our garden and our visiting expert from Room 9, Hamish, showed us how to take the seeds out of the sack in the middle. We found lots of tiny seeds. We looked at them carefully and found out that they look like little crator shapes.

Next our other visiting expert, Mrs Williams, showed us some different types of soil and how to get the seed trays ready for planting. We put newspaper in the bottom of them to make sure that the soil didn't fall through the holes in the bottom of the trays. We then filled them with potting mix and seed raising mix. We are going to find out which type of mix is best for growing our seeds.

We have also been learning about different types of plants that are good to grow in our garden to feed the butterflies. They are nectar plants and the butterfly trust have helped us by telling us the types of plants that are best for butterflies. We used their special chart and found these seeds were the best.

We have put the seeds into the seed trays. We are now watching these carefully to make sure they are growing. We have also learnt that we need to make sure we keep them watered and warm so they can grow.

We were lucky enough to be chosen to have a room decorated for the All Blacks Test. Nataliya entered our class on the internet and the people from 91ZM radio station came out to school. We chose to have our library decorated so that the whole school could enjoy the decorations. We had a fantastic time blowing balloons and tying streamers. Thanks 91ZM!

We have been busy in Room 1 redesigning our junior school playground. Our wonderful PTA has made it safe for us and has purchased a new sandpit cover which we love. We want to be as proud of this area as we are of our butterfly garden and thought that it needed to show our community what the kids at Burnside enjoy doing and are good at.

We have been learning how to use media blender to draw our designs and are still working together to make them even better. We have been learning to show Kaitiakitanga. This is looking after people, places and things. We think our design will show that the kids at Burnside are very good at doing this.

We will be putting updates on the website so you can follow our learning and design journey until the playground is completed.

We are learning how to read and write instructions. We have been busy making lots of crafty things based on our reading books and will be writing how to make these so others can follow our instructions to make their very own cool bumper cars, salt dough dinosaurs, and character faces.

We wrote these instructions together as a class so we could learn what things good instructions need.

* a list of ingredients or things that will be needed to complete the instructions

* a verb to start each instruction. This tells the reader what action they need to do.

* a noun so that the reader knows what they will be using to follow the instruction.

* a closing sentence to tell the reader something interesting about what they have done.

We have been learning about caring for our environment and nurturing plants. While we have been looking after our butterfly garden, we have also watched the peach tree growing full of fruit.

We joined up with our buddy class, Room 10, to make use of all the fruit that was on this tree.

They helped us by picking the fruit from the tree because it was too high for us.

We all met in the hall, with clean hands, and began to clean and cut the fruit. We had to make sure that we took the stones out from the middle.

Our buddy class were wonderful helpers and we were rewarded at playtime with our very own peach to eat.

After play we came back to the hall to do the second batch of peaches. While we had been at play the first batch had been stewed. There was a wonderful smell in the hall from the cooked fruit.

This time we kept cutting the fruit until all the peaches were gone. We then made some labels so we could remember what was in the containers and who had made them.

We had a great time with our buddy class and we are looking forward to using our frozen peaches to make something wonderful later on in the year. We think it is a good idea to freeze all this fruit because it would be a waste if we left it to rot on the tree.

Room 1 has been involved in tagging and releasing butterflies for the Monarch Butterfly New Zealand Trust.

We had a lovely afternoon finding out how to do this and we all took care of the butterfly, carefully passing it on to each other to have a look. We then released it in our butterfly garden.

This is the round, sticky label that we had to stick onto the hind wing of the butterfly. It has a special number on it. We put this into the computer and we hope someone else catches it and tells us where it has flown to.

We have had a busy start to our year. We have enjoyed swimming lessons where we have learnt to...

We also had a fun time trying to keep our eggs on our spoons to reach the other side of the pool!