A new start for Room 3

Room 3 will be back to school on the 3 February. We have a great year planned with more blogging and comments for kids being a priority for us. Our experience with Nabby 3 last year was a great experience and you can read about that here.


Since my students have been blogging and commenting they have found a meaningful audience for their own writing. This has inspired the most reluctant readers and writers to participate. As a teacher that has been very heart-warming. I will continue to develop this and add more challenges to inspire more blog posts.


I start back with 14 year 6s, who I taught last year as year 5s and 17 new year 5's. I am looking forward to being a part of their learning journey.


Happy New Year everyone!

Oh No! We Painted the Windows!

That's right! We painted our windows because we ran out of wall space.

In term 3 we explored traditional Indian art and dance. We discovered Rangoli patterns through Ms Sherning our art teacher. We had no wall space left so we painted the windows!

Lennox said, " Ms Matthews, I can't believe Mr Taylor let us paint the windows it is so much fun!"

More Camp Fun

Here it is as promised.
I have managed to load up a showcase of some of the photos into a photo story for you.
Room 3 students are also creating their own photo stories or movie on camp. This will also include a recording of their camp recount. This you will be able to view on their kidblogs over the next week. There is a link on the side to find those.
The goal of their movie and recount is to be evidence of them 'Managing Themselves'.
This was the big learning focus on camp as well as having FUN!
Grab some popcorn, pull up a cushion and enjoy!

Camp Reflections

We had a wonderful time on camp! The marae was a wonderful and unique experience for most of us. Courtney's reflection of the marae was that 'it was full of love and had lots of people there that shared with us and gave us a lovely hangi dinner'. I thought that was a great description.

Very soon we will post a photo story of our activities, recounts and maybe some videos. Our Internet access is sooooooooo slow at school that it is hard to achieve some of the things we would like to do but we manage with it. Ms Matthews has taken her laptop home so she can load our video and photo stories on from home where the Internet access is 'super sonic' fast compared to school. We know that our board chairman is working on making this better for us and Mr Taylor is keen to see this happen too.

In the mean time have a read of our kidblog reflections. Our reflections are 2 stars and a wish for camp and some of us managed to load a photo.

PJ hasn't come home!

Here is a blog post from Frances about her possum PJ. He is famous in our class because we hear so much about him and he has visited Room 3, you can see pictures and read about that here. This post is beautifully written as Frances and her Dad are looking to find PJ who has disappeared. We all hope he comes to visit her soon everyone misses the PJ stories in our class.

Camp Fun!

We have began this term preparing for our camp. It has been fun and we are very excited about what we will be doing. Tomorrow we have to be at school by 7.30am with our bags packed ready to go. We used Google maps to help us with the time we need to leave school to be at camp on time!

One of the things we are going to do on camp is visit a Marae. We have been preparing hard for that because it is the first time most of us have experienced a Marae visit. Melville Intermediate have helped us with our mihi mihi on skype so we can say these on our visit, that was awesome!

Here is a sample of what it was like from our end!



We have also used Pecha Kucha to make presentations about the Marae we are visiting. This is a new skill we are learning for presentations. We made a mini Pecha Kucha where we used one slide for each student in our group and we had to talk for 20second to each slide. We were learning about the Marae so we understand how we need to behave and what to expect when we get there. Wow that was interesting!

We look forward to telling you about our great experience when we get back.

Pet Day!

Our annual Pet Day was a busy, sunny event.

Room 3 had a number of winning entries in the lamb and calf section but unfortunately they can't represent the school at Group Day because they will be on camp!

Maddie's rabbits won in the domestic pet competition which was really nice considering her upsetting experience with her per lamb passing away :-(

You can read about that on Maddie's blog, warning it is very sad!

Enjoy our photostory!