Sunday 26 May 2013

What a Week!


Room 20 has capped off a brilliant start to Term 2 by winning an amazing 3 awards at Assembly this afternoon - Zero Waste Wally, Baby Shrek and the Mathletics Class Award.

Elm Park School is an Enviroschool and at each Assembly, we recognise the classes that are contributing in positive ways to the environment.  Zero Waste Wally will be visting our classroom for the next couple of weeks to see how great we are at turning off lights to conserve energy.  

Baby Shrek is awarded to the class with the best behaviour at Assembly.  Room 20 did an outstanding job and we were surprised and excited to win the award.

But the award that was the most special for us was the Mathletics Class Award.  At the beginning of this term, we set ourselves a class goal that at some point this term, we would win the Mathletics trophy.  To achieve this, we would have to work together - everyone had to play their part and work towards gaining bronze certificates.  Every morning, we tally up the bronze certificates earned, the total class points and also who our top Mathletes are.  This has been so motivating.  We went over to Assembly knowing we had a good chance, but we just didn't know how the other classes had been doing.  When we heard that 3rd place had earned 25 certificates, we knew we were in the top two.  Second place - 33 certificates.  We knew our tally was 41.  We had done it!  This has been a real team effort and we took the award after earning over 100 000 points over the past 3 weeks.  We were so proud of this because we had worked so hard.  

Our next challenge is to see if we can all earn a gold certificate by the end of the year.  26 weeks left - it's entirely possible...

Our fourth celebration at Assembly today was that our classmate, Anahita, was named Head Girl for 2013.  Congratulations to you Anahita!  We are all so proud of you.

What a week in Room 20!  We are looking forward to seeing how much more we can achieve over the term.

Thursday 16 May 2013

Learning Sign Language

This week is New Zealand Sign Language Week and Deaf Aotearoa has issued the challenge for every New Zealander to learn 25 signs.  Room 20 accepted this challenge for our homework task this week.  We decided to start by learning the finger-spelling alphabet - that's 26 signs already!  Then we really got inspired.  We used the Online Dictionary of Sign Language and learned how to sign words that we find useful or interesting.  Some of us have mastered up to 40 signs!  We have even begun learning how to sign this amazing song, Paradise by Waimarie Smith.  What a gorgeous interpretation of New Zealand.  Have a listen and learn some of the signs below:



Wednesday 8 May 2013

Welcome!

Hi there

Welcome to Room 20's 2013 blog.  This is a place where we will share the learning and events happening in our classroom.  We are excited that you will be sharing our journey with us.

We are a class of Year 6 students based at Elm Park School in Auckland New Zealand.  This year we are planning on taking the blogging world by storm!  Each and every student in our class has their own blog, on which to share their personal learning stories.  Click on the links at the right to see their work.  We are looking forward to seeing how widely viewed our blogs will become.

Please check back regularly, view our work, and leave us comments.  We love feedback and are looking forward to hearing from you.

Room 20