Term+2

=Term 2 is almost over already, it has gone so quickly! We are having our showcase on Wednesday 1st July, there will be two identical sessions, one at 2pm - 3pm and another at 6pm - 7pm. Parents and caregivers and family are welcome to attend the session that best suits them, a letter of invitation went home to whanau last week.= ===You will be able check out some of our wall spaces in Room 15, especially our Inquiry wall, and don't forget to have a peek outside in the corridor to see what we have been up to. There will be a digi blue presentation of our term's work and the students are looking forward to talking visitors through their learning this term and visitors are encouraged to visit the other top block classrooms too. ===

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=Our trip with Room 18 on June 25th to Maungatautari Mountain was very cold but fantastic. We got to see and hear a lot of native New Zealand birds, and identify some native plants and trees in their natural habitat. Our senior Te Reo group talked with us about some of the traditional Maori medicines which can be made using Kawakawa leaves. =

=We were also able to see the kaka being hand fed in the bush, we climbed the 16 metre viewing tower, we saw rare hihi (stitchbird) feeding from bird feeders. We heard tui, saw lots of waxeyes, some kereru (wood pigeons) and a cute little tomtit. We learned about introduced predators and Maungatautari Ecological Island Trust's efforts to eradicate them from their fenced sections on the mountain. It was a fabulous day enjoyed by all. = = = =Many thanks to the parent helpers who took time out of their day to come with us and support our learning. = Check out some of the photos we took ... .

=On Wednesday May 27th we got to plant native trees with Rooms 12, 13, 14 and 18 on the banks of the Mangapiko Stream, thanks to the Honda Trust Fund who donated around 800 trees for the local community to plant. It was a nice sunny day, we walked down armed with spades and gumboots. Everyone participated enthusiastically and did an awesome job planting all the trees within an hour. When we got back to class we did a brainstorm titled "We made a difference today by ..." In planting these trees many of us were able to fulfill our pledge to Mother Earth and we now have photo evidence. Check out our inquiry wall in the classroom for our brainstorm ideas and many more photos. =

===We are working on our conservation/sustainability research projects - we have each chosen an organisation or business that promotes conservation and/or sustainability and are researching, making notes and designing a poster about that organisation. === ===We are well into our report writing for the term in Room 15, check out some of our reports on our Students' page of our wiki. Our reading programme continues to be centred around our inquiry big environmental question "What in the World Can We Do?" ===

We have a Fact File Library in class too, with lots of brochures and information about our environment and ways we can help.
 =Rebekah Lo's visit to school earlier in the term, as a visiting artist, was an awesome = =opportunity for us to unleash our artistic potential, check out some of our great pukeko sketches! We then used a grid to enlarge a picture of a pukeko, first in pencil and then we used oil pastels to colour them. =