The art exhibition

We recently had the long awaited art exhibition. Room 8 created the pictures below using oil pastels. 

The inspiration for the piece of art we created came from the Turangawaewae unit we did in term 1.

The sun represents the community, the tree is the school and each branch represents the classes. The background represents the world we are all a part of.

We also finished our clay leaves which we are very proud of!!

More buddy class photos - reading to our buddies

Here are some more pictures of us with our buddies from Room 2.

Room 8 and Room 2 Buddy classes!

Our buddy class - Room 2

Our buddy class is room 2. They are almost all year 2's and their teacher is Mrs. M.

We visit each other's class and read to them or share with them what we have been doing.

This week we shared with them the books we made about 'Keeping ourselves safe'.

We know that they are younger than us so we made sure that we wrote in tidy handwriting so they could read it easily. We also added some illustrations to help them read. We made sure we used appropriate language for their age.

Daily 5

This year we are doing our literacy learning through a programme called 'Daily 5'.

Each day we try and complete 2 or 3 of the daily 5...(we prefer to take our time and get some good reading happening, instead of fitting 5 different literacy activities in each day).

Read to self: We read to our selves quietly

Read to someone: We read to someone else to practice reading out loud

Listen to reading: we listen to reading while looking at the words, we enjoy listening to 'Story line on line (check out the website here) 

Work on writing: We work on our writing individually

Word work: We practice our spelling words in different ways, for example with magnetic letters, chalk outside, scrabble letters
Our spelling words are recorded in our 'word wall' book.

This is what Daily 5 looks like...
Read to self,

Ask your child about Daily 5 and their word wall books!

The Movie Festival

In term 1 we made a short movie to show something about our school. We made movies about 'The cool kids kitchen, The big slide, Putikitiki and 'Look, draw, look'. 

We discovered that it is quite hard to get good sound from just the ipad, and also we have to hold it really still to get a good picture.

The movie that was chosen was 'Rules of the big slide'. Edie did a bit of editing and we will be learning how to do this ourselves this year.

We had a 'movie festival' for positive assembly last week. We watched all the movies, they were really good. As a class we enjoyed room 9's and room 1's the best.

We now have to work out how to load our movie to the blog as it is too big...watch this space

Preparing for the art exhibition!!

Hamilton East School is preparing for our very own art exhibition. Every class is working on art to display and in room 8 we have been making clay leaves to display. 

We started by describing Autumn and the changes we see in the colour of our surroundings.

We then looked at some pictures of leaves and thought about the colours and what we liked and didn't like about the art.

In groups we looked at each picture and wrote down what we liked, didn't like and what we thought was interesting about each picture.

MAKING THE LEAVES

To make the leaves we had to find some leaves that were a good shape and had veins that we could feel. We needed leaves like this so we could press them into the clay to make a good imprint.

We looked for our leaves in the garden behind the hall and found heaps of different ones.

We then sketched our leaves in our sketching books, we used the 'whispering, talking, shouting' pencil strokes that we learnt at the beginning of term.

We practiced sketching the veins and outline of the leaf with different shades of pencil.

Using the clay

Once we had found, studied and sketched our leaves we were ready to start making the clay leaves.

We started rolling the clay in our hands and making sure all the airbubbles were squashed out of it, this stops it cracking in the kiln.

Then we rolled the clay flat and to the right size for our leaf.

Next we pressed our leaf into the clay and rolled it with our rolling pin. Then slowly we pulled the leaf off and worked on the imprint. We used tools to make the veins deeper and we cut out the leaf.

We were really pleased with our leaves but when we thought about the shape, we realised leaves aren't always flat.

We made a second batch of leaves and this time tried curving up the edges of the leaves to see if we could make them a bit more realistic looking. 

Edie took them to Peachgrove road Intermediate school where they have a kiln. They had to stay in the kiln for a long time, a few days!

Painting the leaves

We thought about the colour of leaves and realised they are all different greens, browns and yellows.

To prepare for getting the right colour we tried making our own greens with pastels.

We started with the primary colours blue, red and yellow.

We then tried mixing each of the colours together to see what colours we could make. We experimented with more and less of each colour and made heaps of different shades of green.

In these photos we are pointing to the colour we liked the most that we made. We wonder if we will be able to make the same greens when we mix the paint for the leaves.

Some of us even named the new colours that we made...come and look at our sketching books to see the names we came up with!!