Room 22 (Ashgrove Satellite Class)

This week we 'travelled' to the beautiful Carribean country of Jamaica! As always, we started our week by going on Google Earth and having a look at what the country looks like. Jamaica has lots of mountains, lots of trees, and AMAZING beaches. The capital city is called Kingston. We then usually colour in the flag of the country, but today we cut out pieces of green, black and yellow cardboard and made a jigsaw puzzle flag instead. It was tricky to put it back together! In cooking we are trying traditional recipes from each country. For Jamaica we made banana fritters, which we thought would be a bit like pikelets, but they weren't! They don't have any eggs or baking powder in them so they aren't fluffy. They are more chewy than we expected. Everyone helped to make them and gave them a taste and some of us thought they were really yummy. Mashing the bananas was the most fun bit! Can you guess what country we are vi

Our Mexico week was full of prickly cactus plants, spicy foods and giant sombreros! Here are a few photos of what we got up to: We all tried on Sitereh's amazing sombrero! It was really heavy on our heads. In cooking we made quesadillas, which are a bit like cheese toasties made with tortillas. We put chicken and cheese and refried beans in them, then dipped them in salsa and sour cream when we ate them. Most of us thought they were really yummy! We also practiced saying 'Hola' for hello, and listened to lots of great mexican songs. We loved visiting Mexico! I wonder where we are going next week.....

Right next to our classroom is the Ashgrove School hall. Over the last few weeks the hall has been closed while builders have been putting new cladding on the outside of it. While doing this work, they also discovered that when it was built the cables weren't buried deep enough under the concrete, so guess what? This week they have been smashing up all the concrete and taking it away. Boy has it been loud in our unit!!! The students have been very interested in what has been making our class rumble and shake so we put on some ear defenders and looked over the fence. There were lots of men in high vis vests, with hard hats on to keep them safe. They had a little digger, a jack hammer and lots of wheelbarrows. Hopefully next week they will be moving on to a quieter part of the project!

In Week 3 our country of study was the Philippines. We chose this country because on of our students, Savannah's family come from the Philippines and in a couple of weeks they are going back there to visit her grandparents.  All week we practiced saying "Kumusta" when greeting each other, and we enjoyed looking around the Philippines on Google Earth - what a beautiful place! We also listened to Filipino songs on youtube, including a folk song called Bahay Kubo, which we then linked with an art activity (see the photos below) Everyone put a lot of effort into our flag colouring, the yellow stars and sun were fun to colour in. We played a game called 'Piko' which is very similar to hopscotch. It was tricky hopping across the squares. Great work guys. On our outing we visited the Philippines Bakery on Papanui Rd. It smelled delicious! We had a look at all the different foods they sold, then we chose a couple of treats to take back to school

Wow, week 2 by! We all had an awesome time learning all about the amazing country of Japan.  Here is a quick snapshot of a few of things we got up, including Friday's definite highlight of making sushi with a real chef, called Shu, who works at Hachi Hachi - make sure you pop in and see him sometime and buy some sushi for yourselves! We used a website to translate our names into Japanese - they looked very different! The Japanese flag is very easy to colour in. We had a go at making some origami fish, and also coloured in some pictures of Koi. In art we painted some beautiful cherry blossoms, by using the bottom of a soft drink bottle dipped in paint. In cooking we made teriyaki beef with vermicelli noodles on lettuce cups - yum! Sophie-Marie enjoyed the cooking, but it was a bit tricky to pick up in the lettuce! Chopsticks are tricky! Kieran practiced using them with cotton wool balls. We went to Kosco Asian supermarket and bought some treats