Room 22 (Ashgrove Satellite Class)

This week Rm22 'travelled' to the Mediterranean country of Greece. The first thing we do each week is use Google Earth to have a look around the new country. What does it look like? What is the same as NZ and what is different? Is it mountainous or flat? Does it have beaches? What do the houses look like? What famous places are in that country that we can look at? The first thing we noticed about Greece is that it is made up of a few islands, and has lots of beautiful beaches. Also, the houses look quite different, they are mostly white with flat roofs and are pretty close together. There are lots of hills and mountains in Greece.  There is also lots of very very very old buildings, some of them are now ruins. We had a look around the parthenon, acropolis, and Theatre of Dionysus Eleuthereus. What amazing old buildings!   In art we made our own versions of the acropolis, and then translated our names into Greek and put these on them. Unfortunately I didn't take any phot...

Oops - sorry it took me a couple of weeks to post these photos! The second half of the term always gets away on me! South Africa week was heaps of fun.  Some of the highlights included our trip to the Taste of Africa shop, where we purchased some treats to try (Chutney flavoured chips, and safari animal iced biscuits); learning to dance the Gwara Gwara dance, making rainsticks and necklaces, and cooking a delicious Malva pudding. And of course, our visitor for the week - Sophie-Marie's toy cheetah. Here a few (actually a whole bunch of) photos from our week:

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...