R..r..r..r

This week our letter is Rr. It makes a stretchy sound.

We watched and listened to the Rainbow Fish story and then we made our own beautiful Rainbow Fish to hang from the window.

It was great to have Blake and Dallas visiting for 4-stars and they were super workers!

Look what we made...

S-s s

Our letter this week is Ss.

This has a sound that is easy to recognise but often hard to say! If your child has trouble with this sound, encourage them to take their time and s-t-r-e-t-c-h or 'chunk' the word. It can be tricky when it is in the middle!

'Sh'is a digraph using 's'. Digraphs happen when the letters make a different sound together, than they do on their own. Say the sounds separately then join them together snd you'll see what I mean!

Talk about s sounds and the sh digraph with your child- make a list of words together. See if they recognise s blends like st, sm and sl too.

Have a look at the Sea-horses we made at 4Stars....

O-o is for octopus

This week at 4 stars we looked at O.  O is a vowel which has a long and a short sound.

This time we are focusing on the short 'o' as in octopus and ostrich.

Knowing this sound will help in reading and writing when trying to sound out words.

We listened to an octopus story and made our own octopus. We made sure we had 8 legs on our octopus because we learnt that oct means 8 - an octagon has 8 sides!

Cooper joined us today and explored our classroom. He enjoyed our Dora Alphabet cards!

B..b..Bears!

Our letter for this week is Bb..... 

So today we sang 'b'songs and read a story about a VERY grumpy bear....

Then we made our own bears and we will show them at our assembly in the morning.

It was great to have Cohen with us for his first day at school and Cooper came to join us as part of 4 Stars. 

Have a look at our boisterous bears.....!

H-h-h. We made hats

Our letter this week is Hh so today we made Lemon Squeezer Army Hats.

We learnt that Colonel Malone from Stratford invented the Lemon Squeezer hst. The top of it is shaped like Mt Taranaki and it helps to keep the rain off.

Colonel Malone wore his hat at Gallipoli.

Look at us in our hats!

A is for A.N.Z.A.C Day

We made these fabulous sunset/sunrise silhouettes today at 4 Stars. The hill represents the hills of Gallipoli and the crosses are to remember soldiers who died there. We have started to build an understanding of ANZAC Day and its ceremonies. We read the lovely book "My Grandad Marches on ANZAC Day" by Catriona Hay and Benjamin Johnson and we thought about what it would have been like to be in the war 100years ago.

It was exciting to have Kage, De andre and Chante join us for the afternoon. At the end we played ANZAC Fruit Salad  ( a chasing game ). Instead of fruit, we were ANZAC, Gallipoli and Last Post !

We welcome any beginning students to visit on Thursdays at 1.25 to get to know us and work within the classroom...... if you are interested, ring the office and let Raewyn know.

D-d-d-d-DINOSAURS!

What an exciting afternoon we had today, working with the letter Dd and it was great to have Kage and Katelyn here working with us.

We read Ruth Paul's great STOMP book and used this to try and create colourful dinosaurs.

We had a peek at some 'real' dinosaurs using a virtual reality I-Dinosaur book from Hawera library. We managed to capture this guy and photograph him sitting on a friendly arm!

After that we made our dinosaurs and went outside for our own STOMP adventure. We stomped, jumped, roared, and crawled around having great fun!

Haxe a look at our work from today.........