Room 24

Last week we studied Kwanzaa, an African American celebration held around Christmas time. We looked at Africa and USA on the map. Kwanzaa is a celebration of the harvest of fruit and vegetables. Everyday for seven days, a candle is lit to represent a different special value. Kwanzaa was started to highlight the special culture and heritage of African Americans. We made the candelabra of seven candles with Room 25 and discussed similarities to Hanukkah (11 candles).  The team from ASB came in to talk to the children about money. Tamati did a wonderful lesson on how we should buy things that we need rather than things that we want. He also talked about coins, notes, cents and dollars.

Room 24 have been rapidly gaining swimming skills with our three coaches from Swimsation. Swimming is the highlight of the day and we still have one week of lessons to go!

This term we are taking part in junior athletics. Each week we participate in 10 minute revolving sessions of running, obstacle courses, relays, javelin and beanbag throwing. Here we are learning to throw the 'javelin' as far as possible.

The class have been learning all about Diwali celebrations and boy has it been fun! Instead of our usual fitness in the morning we have been doing Indian dancing. Room 24 are fortunate to have experts in the class who were able to teach us about Diwali and Hinduism. We have looked the Hindu gods and ways of celebrating Diwali. The children were interested in how there are seven continents in the world and that India lies in Asia. Next week we will be looking at celebrations around the world including Hannukah and the Winter Solstice.

Click here for photos This term our genre of writing is persuasive writing. We played on the playground to help us think about what, in our opinion, is the best thing to play on. We had a fabulous time. Today we visited the seniors at their athletics day to see what athletics day is all about. We will have the junior one later this term in Week 6. The children enjoyed their earthquake drill so much yesterday that we did another one again today. They are very good at being turtles under the desk. Ka pai, Ruma Rua Tekau ma Wha!

Welcome to Room 24's blog. We are a Year 1 class of 5-6 year olds at Edendale School. Please click on the above pages to have some learning fun.