This week's wrap up

This week we have been learning about Ancient Greece and today we had an Olympics mufti day. There were gymnasts, hockey players and runners etc. By Zara and Jessica Y.

Ancient Greece

On Friday, we were introduced to our new inquiry topic - Ancient Greece. The children were split into 3 groups -

Boys - went to an Athenian school to learn their alphabet, some poetry and to compete in the Olympics
Girls - learnt how to take care of the household for when they had husbands and children
Slaves - a mixture of boys and girls who had to do whatever their masters told them to do

The Athenian schoolboys enjoying a soak in the tubs

Athenian boys getting their feet washed by slaves

What an interesting day! There were both positive and negative comments about daily life in Ancient Greece, but most importantly, we had lots of questions we wanted answered.

Here is a wee video with some wonderful facts, and a cool tune!

Note for parents: We are in the process of making lapbooks to present all of our new learning - this is a huge task, and requires us to use a combination of known and new reading strategies to make judgements about what information we need to summarise. Most of our reading programme during Week 2, and parts of Week 3, will be based around Ancient Greece.

As always, we ask that each child reads for 15-20 minutes each night. Here are some suggestions:

• Research on Ancient Greece - children may need help with search terms if using the internet
• Bug Club - new books added today
• Library book of your child's choosing
• Browsing box book from the class - children are required to self-manage this.

Welcome to Term 3!

Hi Room 20! It's going to be a busy term, with some very exciting topics coming up for you. I hope you've all had a lovely break, and have managed to get a lot of rest so that you are ready to get into your learning tomorrow. I know I'm rested and ready to go!


The Olympics start on the 27th of July - a competition I will be following closely. What sports would you like to watch during the Olympic Games? Leave us a comment below to tell us (please remember to leave your name, and check your spelling and punctuation before posting).

The Olympic Rings - I wonder what they symbolise?

Some (very late) snow pics!

Some pics of our snow bunnies - Kate, Zara (both with siblings) and Harriet. What huge smiles you all have!!

100 word challenge!

We used this 100 word challenge prompt to writing a story about Moby and his friend (who we later found out was called Tim). Please read what 4 children in our class wrote, in 100 words or less. Aren't they clever?

Moby in the Jungle
Once upon a time there were two men but actually one was a robot. But lets get on the the story. Moby and Darryl slept in the jungle for 100 days and 99 nights. On the last day in the jungle, they went looking for something. Can you guess? It was gold. But guess what they found? P.S they found rubbish. The end.
~by Ruby

Moby and his friend Sam were walking along in the creepy jungle. Just then a cheeky monkey came along and stole Moby's hat, then behind some trees they saw what they've been looking for, for ages... They tried to open the treasure chest, but it wouldn't budge, so they looked around for a while, and found a key. They opened the treasure chest and were amazed what they saw. There was gold, diamonds, gemstones, and rubies. It was incredible. They ran as fast as they could and stuffed it all into their pockets. "At last Moby we found it all."
~by Harriet

Once upon a time there were two young men searching the jungle and a monkey stole Moby's hat. The two young men opened the bush and found a lion on gold. They were happy but Moby wasn't because the monkey stole his hat. He was kind of happy but they were more happy that they found it. They ate the chocolate up that they got from the lion. The end. P.S it was fun, yum chocolate. Yum, yum, yum.
~by Lily

Moby and Harry are walking through the jungle. They heard a Tui, parrot, chirping, a monkey and a cricket. Then suddenly a monkey came and took Moby's hat. He was annoyed. Then Harry said, "At last Moby we found it." An old brick, viney, slippery, big, slimy, rickety house with heaps and heaps of really shiny gold. "Moby, aren't we lucky?" "Yeah we are," said Moby. The end.
~by Eli

The North Pole in Christchurch

Snow, snow, and more snow! On Wednesday and Thursday, school was cancelled because of the big snow dump that happened early on Wednesday morning. It was too dangerous for us to come to school because of the ice, so we got to have 2 days off!

Back at school today, we had a challenge where we had to make snowmen in 2 teams. We had 3 minutes to make the first part of the snowman, and then 2 minutes to make the rest of the snowman. We tried as hard as we could to make a big snowman, and we put decorations on.

Our groups both worked really well, and as you can see, the Year 4's all tried really hard to lift the giant middle section they had rolled. They had some success in the end, but the Year 3's won the challenge because they made their snowman in the time that we had.

Check out our photos - Room 20, if you have any snow photos you want to put on the blog, please send them to emma.woolford@halswell.school.nz.

What did you get up to today?

at AnswerGarden.ch.