My Classroom - Term one 2020

Welcome to 2020!

I made it!
I completed my qualification, graduated, got my first teaching job and now I am stoked to welcome you to my classroom! 

For the first few weeks of January I spent many days in my classroom setting it up ready for my tamariki on their first day of school in February.  I was lucky to have some incredible friends come in to help me set everything up with me.

As I spent more time in the space I became so excited about all the possibilities this year would hold. I added numerous personal touches to my set up and put things in place to try out. I really embraced the whole Bee Hive (being Miss Bee) and created numerous bee wall displays throughout my classroom.

Room 7's Hononga Art work

We started the year with an Inquiry around Hononga - connections. In our class we focused on the connections that we had with each other, our whānau and our ancestors. Through different pieces of artwork we created throughout the term we represented our connections through symbols and text. Ākonga showed their whakapapa through a visual pepeha which we have displayed in our classroom. 

Writing: I saw early on that there was a lot of scaffolding needed to engage my ākonga in writing. Our focus for term one was recount writing. With a focus around specific letters of the alphabet I planned a experience lesson, followed by a brainstorming lesson of words and ideas to include in our recount, finally present the scaffold of I saw, I felt, I heard etc for tamariki to bring all their ideas together. Over this time we blew bubbles, bounced balls, chomped chocolate chip cookies, coloured clowns and cats, drumming, and finger painting. In week 6 we used our recount writing knowledge to write thank you letters to the parent helpers who came on our trip with us. 

 Mathematics linked in closely with our writing topic as we started the year with time. We got familiar with the language of first, next, then, before and after. We had some fun reading and then ordering events from the story the hungry caterpillar in groups. We used our knew knowledge of language to sequence our day in room 7 and what our mornings look like before school. We dove deep into learning about times of the day, days of the week, months of the year and seasons.

Term one was full of opportunities for learning outside of the classroom with school swimming three times a week in our school pool and our EOC trip into town. As our Hononga Inquiry was based around visual arts we took the opportunity to adventure around Ōtautahi viewing the creative street art and cultural narrative throughout our hīkoi. The Tūī team teachers created a scavenger hunt to do throughout the day and we finished off at Margaret Mahy Playground for a run around and a play.