Flat Stanley goes to Tauranga!

This week we opened Zane's Flat Stanley package. Zane sent his Flat Stanley to visit his Auntie in Mount Maunganui.

This is what we learnt about Flat Stanley's trip:

1. Hot Pools are special because they are salt water from the sea that has been sucked into the earth, heated, and bubbled back up to the surface.



2. Tramping up the mount is great exercise.


3. Mount Maunganui is famous for its surf beach. There are lots of sand dunes at the beach and great big clumps of seaweed!




Some other things we learnt about New Zealand are:

1. New Zealand is made up of two islands called the North island and the South island. We live in Wellington city which is on the bottom tip of the North Island.

2. Wellington is the capital city of New Zealand and that means that the government buildings are here.

3. John Key is the Prime Minister of New Zealand and he works at the Beehive.

We loved looking closely at the Maps!

We Can't wait to learn all about Australia next week!

Amazing Violin!

In room 4 we were very lucky to have a wonderful violinist play one of our favourite songs for us... Dan played twinkle twinkle little star, he was fantastic! Have a look at the video to see for yourself. Thanks Dan, we loved listening to you play!

How long?

In Maths we are learning about length. We have learnt that a centimeter is around the same length as the width of our finger. Our fingers are around 5 centimeters long and if we open our arms wide they are about one meter long!

We had lots of fun measuring objects around the classroom to see how long or short they are.

We even measured each other to find out who the tallest and shortest children in room four are. We found out that Kai Matthew is the tallest while Esme is the shortest.

A visit from Bob Kerr

We were very lucky to have Bob Kerr Visit our classroom! Bob Kerr is an illustrator and an author. Our favorite Bob Kerr stories are the ones about Mechanical Harry and all the crazy inventions that he creates!

Bob Kerr answered many of our questions. We found out that when he was a little boy, Bob Kerr used to invent things himself and that's where some of his ideas for Mechanical Harry came from.

Bob Kerr brought in examples to show us how drawings change into the pictures that we see in books. We learnt that many of his illustrations come from observing real life things! Like when Bob draws a picture of a little girl he would take a photo of a little girl and then make a drawing from that.

The small drawing that he makes are then enlarged or made bigger. Then Bob uses water colour paints to make his illustrations colourful.

In the end all of the words and illustrations are stapled together and a machine like a photo copier is used to make the books.

Bob Kerr showed us how to make observational drawing of each other. He drew pictures of Lizzie and Harper and then we all had a chance to draw a friend. We were so lucky to have such an amazing visitor! Thanks Bob!!