Taking our rangoli outside

     After we had created some designs we tried drawing large versions outside in the playground with chalk. The colours were beautiful and the playground looked really exciting.

Unfortunately, just after we drew our designs it rained, so they didn't last long. 

Diwali art

This week we tried making Diwali art. This type of art is called rangoli, in Indian culture these patterns are created on the floor in courtyards or outside houses. They are usually used with coloured rice, sand or flowers. The designs can be symmetrical geometric shapes and this is what we based our designs on. 

We started by using a dotted grid to help us make symmetrical geometric patterns. Then we moved onto creating patterns with pastels on paper.

                                               








































We watched clips from youtube of Rangoli art being created to get inspiration.

Happy Diwali

Diwali started today and our Indian students who celebrate Diwali showed us how to dance to Indian music. They explained what Diwali is and what happens. We learnt that it is a festival of lights,  goes on for over a month, and the families spend time visiting each other and taking special foods with them.

We learnt some of the Indian dance moves, we realised it is not as easy as it looks!

Athletics

Erin from Project Energise came to teach us about athletics. 

Here is how to start a sprint

1. Put your foot on the line, foot facing forward
2. Put your bottom in the air
3. Hands clenched lightly
4. Look straight ahead

 Wait for the 'On your marks, get set, GO!!!!

 Here we are starting our sprint

Then we moved on to high jump..

First we practiced the scissor jump

Then we tried jumping over the tape. We had to make sure we lifted the leg closest to the tape first. This was fine when we were jumping with one side (our dominant side). It was harder when we were trying to jump with our non dominant side.

We also were told to keep looking up.

Thanks for coming Erin!

Incredible beans!

We found the beans so fascinating that we sketched them, we also made a Google doc table to monitor the growth and see which bean is growing the fastest.

                                       

We checked whether the beans that had grown the fastest had anything in common. No! They were from both sides of the classroom, some had cotton wool, some had tissue paper. We have not worked out why some grew better than others, we may have to do some research to try and answer this question!

Our beans are growing

We had a look at our beans this week. Most of them have sprouted and some of them have really started to grow interesting looking roots. 

We thought that some of the beans looked a bit like insects

Some of them are still very small

And some have almost turned into proper plants!

 This bean's shoots have grown in interesting directions.

 This one looks healthy!

Performing our plays

After a few days of practicing and creating props we were ready to perform our plays to the rest of the class.

We really enjoyed this groups interpretation of their play. It was about some children who had little brothers and sisters who wanted to play. The actors who played the brothers and sisters were very funny!

This group had made some great props. Their play was about some people who were trying to get to an airport but kept forgetting things and having to go home in the taxi. They missed their plane in the end!

Acting time!

As part of our literacy programme we have been reading and interpreting plays in our reading groups. We read the plays and discussed what it was about. We decided who should be which character and how to manage th eplay if we had more or fewer people than characters.

We improvised some props...

 We practised our lines...

We figured out where we should be standing to best perform the play...and we practised some more.

We found that sometimes it was hard to decide who should take which part. 

Often we ALL wanted the biggest part!  

We realised we needed to use strategies we have learnt during our cooperative games lessons to help us work things out, for example, listening carefully, letting each person speak, and working together.