A visit from an Olympic Athlete

Yesterday Matt Randall came to talk to Gore Main School about his sporting career as an Olympic cyclist and a triathlete. He has competed in many competitions including the commonwealth games. Matt was born in Invercargill it was fantastic for the children to be able to speak to an inspirational athlete who is a fellow born and bred Southlander. 

Matt's key message was to dream big, aim high and never ever give up!!! Matt was only 6 years old when he decided that he wanted to compete in the Olympic Games - it's never to early to set goals and aim high. 

2 children from each class were chosen to ask Matt a good question

Matt competing in a cycle race in Wanaka

His bronze medal from the commonwealth games. His persuit team broke a commonwealth record when he won this medal

Matt gave the children a quiz at the end about the key messages from his talk

Georgia and Hunter asked Matt a question each. Hunter wanted to know the longest distance he's ever cycled on one day ...over 300km!!

Wheels Day

Today we were allowed to bring our wheels to school to ride at morning tea and lunch time. Thanks to the Gore Main student council for organising such a fun lunch time activity!!

Room 3's Food Scraps!

Ever wondered where all of your food scraps go after Fruit Snack Break? Well usually they go straight into the worm farm to feed the Enviro Group's worms (they turn the left over fruit and veges into worm juice for the gardens), when the worm farm is full the scraps are put into the school's two compost bins...they are overflowing at the moment too!

So with both compost and worm farm chocka full last weekend Miss McKenzie took the food scraps home to feed Tahr the pig her house. He was very thankful for the extra food - thank you Gore Main!

He's popping up to say THANKS!!

How To Make A Delicious Sandwich

The children have been writing instructions on how to make a delicious sandwich. On Monday the took turns at reading the instructions they had written to Miss McKenzie as she followed them and made a sandwich.

The children learned about the importance of being really specific when writing instructions and they now know not to miss out any details!

They found out they must say that they want me to "spread the butter on both pieces of bread with a knife" otherwise I might spread the butter with my fingers! Or onto the table instead of their bread!
Details are very important when writing instructions!

All the children managed to carefully write or edit their writing so that they got a perfectly made sandwich!

YUM!

Our Maori Learning

Every second Monday Room 3 goes to the hall to learn Maori with Whaea Marie and Whaea Jean. We sing Maori songs with actions, learn Maori myths and legends and yesterday we learned a new dance with rakau (sticks) and the boys learned a haka!

The boys left the class and spent only 5-10 minutes before coming back to present this haka! Didn't they do a fantastic job! We were so impressed!

While the boys were working on their haka the girls practised using the rakau. They learnt a new move which involves 2 taps on the ground, then they toss the rakau and catch both at the same time...tricky!

Reading Time

The Mercury reading group read a book about Bats, it showed on a map all the places in the world where you can find bats. According to the book NZ doesn't have bats! Well we do! The Mercury reading group have become experts on NZs own bat species - The NZ Native Bats (Pekapeka).

They researched using the internet and printed out information sheets. Here they are reading the information sheets and highlighting key information/facts they will be including on their NZ Native Bats. This is quite a skill to master - Well done team!

Sunflower Maths

We are watching our real sunflowers grow in class. Some are getting very tall!! Miss McKenzie planted a third seed in some children's pots - cross your fingers the seeds will grow this time! 

Since we aren't having much luck with our real sunflowers we have made some paper ones during maths time today. We randomly chose a piece of ribbon and estimated how long our lengths of ribbon (the stems) were in blocks. We then measures to check our estimation! 

Here are our sunflowers ... 

Move and Improve

Every Wednesday after lunch we go to Move and Improve in the hall. We do fun gymnastics activities that get us moving and improving our skills in balancing, forwards and backwards rolls, using hulla hoops. We use lots of different body parts and we think we are getting stronger and stronger by the minute! 

Here are some photos and videos of us in action yesterday

Here are some videos too (these may only be visible from laptops not iPads unfortunately)