City of Ember - Book Review

This is the story of a boy and a girl who live in the City of Ember. Their city is dark and they are starting to have black-outs, where their electricity stops working for minutes at a time. Lina and Doon are worried for the future of their city, and they start to look for solutions. 

This is a terrific book to read, with lots of adventures. We would recommend this book for anyone aged 7+. As soon as we finished reading it, we wanted to start reading the next book.

"I liked it on the day when the school kids got their jobs (assignment day)" - Eve, Livvy and Mared

"I liked it when the special box was found with the instructions" - Osian, Annabelle, Mared and Cassidy

"I liked the bit when the lights went off and Lina couldn't find her baby sister, Poppy" - Briar and Eve

"I liked all of the blackouts" - Sam

"It was funny when Poppy ate the instructions" - Willis, Heath, Cassidy, Skye and Harvey

"I really liked when Lina was caught by the chief guard" - Harvey, Alec and Ned

"I liked the bit when Doon and Lina saw the fox," - Addy, Jess, KC, Hannah and Oscar

"I liked the bit when Lina and Doon found what they needed to begin their exit" - Austin

"I liked it when they ate their first plum," - Cassidy

"I really liked it when the class started making connections in the story, and everything started to make sense as the puzzle came together." - Mrs May

Lawrence Fire Service Visit

Today we had a visit from the Lawrence Fire Service. They came to tell us some key messages about keeping safe in a fire. They also did a water demonstration with the hoses, and then they talked about the clothing that they wear to keep themselves safe. Check out their visit on the video. 

Gymfest Routines on Video

Flyer's Boys Mat Routine

Boy's Second Super Springer's Floor Routine

Get NZ Writing Project

Room 4 are involved in a nation-wide writing project, called 'Get NZ Writing'.

We have been investigating metaphor, as a way of describing things. 

We have written a metaphor for Room 4 and we have written a metaphor poem about ourselves. Today we each write a line of our own poem on the back of one of these postcards. Then we coloured the postcards and put them all together to see what our finished product would look like.

We send this, along with some other bits and pieces to a school in Rotorua. The courier will be calling into school on Thursday to collect it.

Then sometime in the near future, we will receive a package that has been created for us by another school. 

It is heaps of fun.

Garden Colouring Competition Winner - Hannah

Mrs Hughes runs a special gardening club and they had a competition day where you could make a scarecrow, and you could also enter a colouring competition.

All fo Room 4 entered the colouring competition and the lucky winner was Hannah! This is her great picture. We all thought she deserved to win.

Symmetrical butterlfies

 These are some very colourful symmetrical butterflies that we made with Mrs Howell.

 We start by folding a piece fo paper in half. 

 Then we unfolded it and blobbed colourful painted on one half of the paper. 

 Then we folded the paper again and pressed it gently.

 We unfolded it and left the paint to dry.

 When they were dry we drew our butterfly shape onto the paint with a vivid. 

 We had to include a head...

 ...an abdomen...

 ...and a thorax.

 We chose a special fabric background.

 We tried to choose a colour that made our butterfly stand out of the paper. 

 They are a lovely bright addition to our classroom wall. 

Student of the week - Jared

We've all been doing a lot of swimming over the past 7 weeks and making huge improvements. Over the past two weeks, Jared has shown us just how well he can swim. He participated as one of the youngest competitors at the South Otago swimming sports last week and was fast enough to qualify for the Under 9's races at the Otago Primary champs. Yesterday in our own school swimming, he competed in many events and gave all of the older competitors a real run for their money. You are a great wee swimmer Jared, and we are very proud of how well you are doing. Keep it up. 

Metaphor Poems

This week in Room 4 we have been investigating metaphor as a way of writing. We have been using things that we are like to help to describe us. Today we wrote a poem about our class and everyone helped to write it. This is our poem:

Room 4 is a bag of fruit burst lollies,

all sweet but different flavours.

We are a fast, noisy, Mustang; all going places.

We are a cherry blossom tree, sweet, kind, bursting with colour and standing out from the rest.

We are Gabriel’s Gully because we are gold, special

and beautiful.

We are a club sandwich; all types that stick together

and combine perfectly.

We are skins shorts; sporty, fast and very smooth.

We are Room 4.

Student of the week - Charlotte

Following our hold-up last week we all wrote some creative accounts of our adventures. We used the actual experience of the ambush, but we all embellished a little to add interest and intrigue to our story. Charlotte did a great job of making her story more interesting by adding detail and description. Great work Charlotte, keep it up. 

Scarecrow fun

 We have had such a lot of fun this week researching, planning and making a scarecrow. We are going to enter him in the competition this Sunday. We hope he scares the birds away from the gardens at the hospital. 

South Otago athletes

On Wednesday we had 6 Room 4 people representing LAS at the South Otago Athletics in Balclutha. They were all competing in the sprints. Addy got 1st in the 100m finals and 3rd in the 60m finals. They all ran their very fastest and had a great time taking part. 

Congratulations team, we are very proud of you.  

Froggy visitors

 Today Livvy brought in some very cool visitors for her news. They had found frogs in the swimming pool at their house last night. They were very jumpy little frogs, so we have to be careful as we took our photos. 

A busy weekend for the butterflies

This weekend has been very warm in the classroom, and because of this we had three new butterflies hatch out of their chrysalis' this morning. Dane when in to check on them while he was at school with his Mum, and he spotted that they had all hatched.

I was a lovely warm day, so we took the plants outside to see if the butterflies would fly away when their wings had dried. 

The one in the green bucket flew away, to the top of the very tallest tree, but the other two stayed on the plant. Mrs May took them back inside to keep them safe until they were ready to fly.

She went back to school a couple of hours later, to find that they had left the plant and were flying on the windows. Mrs May opened the windows and let them fly free.

Check out the video of everything that happened below. 

We got a butterfly!!!

 

We have been watching our chrysalis' everyday for two weeks. Everday we hope to see that something is happening, and finally today we noticed that something was!!

 We could see the wings of our butterfly through the chrysalis, and as the day went on the wings become darker and darker, until finally the chrysalis was very black.

We watched with anticipation all day long, just hoping that it would come out while we were at school...even sacrificing our swim this afternoon...and it paid off. 

At 2.05pm our patience was rewarded and we all got to watch as our butterfly pushed its way our of the chrysalis. It was so amazing. Watch the link below to see our video, you will love it.