Jesus is Born

Still Life Painting

What a fantastic day we have had, we got to do a still life painting with the Christchurch Art Gallery. It was so much fun. We got to see some painting that were 200 years old and then some modern art as well. The best bit was we got to create our own still life painting.

       

Come Fly with Me

Today we had fun creating pictures of things that fly with cornflour chalk paint.  Mrs McRandle took our picture then added the image to some clouds. We are really flying in Rata.

Meeting Father Benito

Today we meet Father Benito. He is our new priest and will be here for four years and will work in our parish. He told us he has 20 nieces and nephews and likes to play sport with them. He told us stories about saints and his life in the Phillipines.

Cat in the Hat Day

Today Mrs McRandle spent the day testing our maths so we got to have a great day exploring the Cat in the Hat story with Mrs Fenwick.  We got to write stories, play Cat in the Hat maths game and learned to draw the Cat in the Hat. We had lots of fun after lunch creating our own hat and whiskers. Mrs McRandle and Mrs Fenwick created a great day.

A Day In Rata

Capacity

In maths this week we have been learning all about capacity.  We learnt that it is the amount that something holds. We moved around 8 different stations and had to estimate how many objects would fit onto the container then we checked our estimate by counting the objects. We were surprised that our guesses were quite different to the actual amount.

Then we had to make a container to hold 14 spiders. The amazing thing we discovered was the many different shapes and sizes hold the exact same amount.

Sport Coaches

This week we were learning to throw the discus and shot-put. We had a great time with Chris and Ross the Sport Coaches.

Fabulous Apples

Today we were all given a free apple snack pack from Snappz New Zealand. They were delicious and the best thing is that we have a free voucher each to get a snack pack for free.

Calendar Art

Our calendar art is on display in the classroom. We have created a summer field of flowers. They took us 4 days to create and we used a variety of techniques including sponges, toothbrushes and cotton buds. They will look amazing as diaries and calendars.

Science Alive Visit

Today Science Alive came to school and helped us learn more about our busy bodies. We learnt all about our senses, our heart and lungs and our skeleton. We got to smell things, look at how our eye works, build a skeleton, look at x rays and even got to use a stethoscope. What a great afternoon.

Planter Box

As part of the Kaiapoi Community initiative the school has created a beautiful planter box which was provided by Christine from the You, Me and Us team. The whole school painted it and then Rata took it down to the park and planted it with some lovely plants. It is our job to look after it so if you are passing and feel like giving the plants some water feel free.

Silly Putty

Today we were learning all the Holy Trinity. Now we discovered this is quite hard to understand: there is one God but there are 3 persons whom we call one God - Father , Son and Holy Spirit.
To help us understand we made 3-in-1 silly putty and discovered we needed all 3 parts to make it work. God may be called by different names and be seen in different ways but he is still the same God.

Taste Buds

Your sense of taste begins on your tongue. It has 10,000 tiny bumps called taste buds. Receptors in your taste buds react to chemicals in food and then send messages to your brain. The taste buds can tell the difference between four basic tastes. Salty, sour, sweet and bitter. Your taste buds are constantly being replaced. On average, a taste bud lasts for ten days.

Today we got to try several different tastes: sweet, sour and bitter. We tried lemons, raisins, citrus peel, sour babies, jelly beans and 90% cocoa dark chocolate. We thought the chocolate would be sweet and delicious, but we were wrong it was bitter and we couldn't eat it. The citrus peel was no bad a little sour and sweet. We discovered that bitter tastes at the back of your tongue, sour in the middle and sweet at the front. We had to think about the flavours and what part of our tongue was reacting. We all had a great time taste testing.

Prayer Spinners

This week we have been using our imagination to help us pray. We thought about the colours of the rainbow and what they may represent. Red represents love, yellow happiness, blue the ocean , indigo peace, green Gods creations, orange courage and purple God.

We made our prayer spinners really colourful and when we look at them we think of all the things the colours represent.

Amazing Maths

Today we were practising our thinking skills with maths. Mrs McRandle gave us the problem...

The answer is 20 what is the question? We had to come up with as many ways as we could to solve this and we were pretty amazing.