Week 4 and LOVING it!

We welcomed Lori to our room today.  She and her little brother Sam have joined us here at Bradford and boy, are we pleased about that!

Room 4 had a little brainstorm this morning.  Wee decided to let Lori know about all the things which make Bradford special!  Here is the long list we came up with, can you think of any more?

• The Japanese garden
• iPads
• our classrooms
• our beautiful murals
• futsal
• all the sports we play
• the teacher - especially Ms Little (I didn't pay ANYONE to say that!)
• the new decks
• the sliding doors
• the new kids
• our playground
• Gill and the library
• making friends
• the chickens
• all the cool trees
• the tyre swing
• the sunflowers in the vege garden
• most of all... THE KIDS!!!!

Welcome back!

Here we are.  The new Room 4!

We have Marnie and Joshua to welcome from other schools!  Kiaora boys, we are so pleased you are here with us!

Even though we have only been back at school for 3 days, we have done quite a lot already!

We visited Harold the giraffe in his caravan and learnt about how we are all different and unique.

We all decided how we wanted Room 4 set up.  We had to think about the best place for things to go, to make sure we had space and we could move around.

We have figured out our behaviour chart for Room 4 - more on that later!

We made a start on our identity boxes and self portraits!

Busy time!

Our beautiful Japanese Garden!

The truck arrives with rocks and limestone!  No idea how we are going to move those rocks!

The raking begins!

Two of the 5 rocks in place!

Get shoveling everyone!

Luke in action - he was amazing!

Half done.  We had to order some more limestone though...

The pavers, we had to figure out where to put them.

Stick to the pavers Caitlin!

Our bonsai tree in place.

Mosses in, can you see the raking we did which looks like ripples in the water?

Dear Mr Graham worked really hard for us and here he is, putting in our mural of the Mouse Bride.

Our finished Japanese inspired Garden!  We love it!

The beginning of the garden

You might be a wee bit curious as to why Room 4's students have been wandering in to school with shoebox lids and stones.  Well, it's all to do with telling our stories.  Room 4 is planning a special garden for our Bradford community to share so today we enjoyed planning our own mini gardens.  

These are just part of the planning stage and there is so much yet to happen as we design the big garden with some extra special artistic features.  Have a wee peek to satisfy your curiosity and don't forget to come back on the 28th for the unveiling of the finished garden.

There are some lovely calm ripples in Kerrianne's garden.

Salesi explored some symmetrical spiral patterns in his garden.

Lindsay used symmetry too.  Her spirals look a little like the koru shape of the emerging fern.

Creating Gorgeous Korowai

Scroll down, really quickly, to the bottom of this post to see the first post about our trip to the art gallery.  Then come back and check this one out too.

Just like our beautiful mural, we're not sharing the final pictures of the korowai.  We want you to get a surprise when you see them at our fabulous art exhibition!

We used the legends we heard and acted out to inspire our fabulous korowai.  Here are photos of the first stages.

Josh put his learning about New Zealand's geography from last term to good use alongside today's legends. 

Charlotte acted the part of Maui's scary grandmother in the legend and this inspired her artwork.

Ms Little and Josh had a great discussion about the detail Josh had drawn on the face.

I wouldn't want to be in the path of Isaac's volcano. It looks very fiery and explosive!

This is the next stage in the process... shhh... don't tell anyone!!

Put Wednesday the 28th of November in your diaries now so you can come and see the gorgeous finished korowai at Bradford's Community Art Exhibition.

Ka kite ano

Trip to the art gallery

We had an AWESOME trip to the art gallery today.  We played a tune with some bells - can you guess what the song is?

 

We had a look at some artworks and found out about them.  John then told us some Maori legends and we even helped him by acting them out. 

Mrs Bennington is going to add some photos of the amazing art work we did with John in the classroom!

Art with Ange

This week we are working on a mural with artist, Ange Spears,  which is to go up on the end of Mr Graham's shed when it is finished.  The mural is showing our school values, Respect, Empathy, Awhina, Integrity and Kia Runga Rawa.

Our class mural is showing Kia Runga Rawa or Aiming high.

We had to think about something we want to be the very best in, or something we do at school which shows Kia Runga Rawa and then paint our picture of that thing onto a part of the mural.

We then had to put all the pieces of the mural together - we didn't show you the final picture - you have to wait and see it when it is up on the new shed!