Kieran Sings For Us

This week Kieran shared his video with Allanah via Skype and YouTube. I thought about how great Kieran's voice is. He has a talent and we love it when Appleby students go on to do well, even after they have left our school.

Photo Competition

We are going to have a photo competition where the first prize is an iPod Touch!
The competition is for all the children and teachers in Allanah's ICTPD cluster. We started learning about how to take good photos today by learning about the rule of thirds.

The rule of thirds is where you take photos with the subject not in the middle of the photo but off to one side and the eyes are where the third lines meet up.

We did very well for a very first go. Here is a photo of how the thirds might look if they were on the photo.

CSI Reading Strategies

We are thinking about the sorts of things that we can do to help us become better readers. We thought about what we do when we get stuck when we area reading. And then we brainstormed what we might do to help us get ourselves unstuck.

Reading is fun when it is not too easy and not too hard. Just right.

The Disco

Today we looked at the photos from Friday's disco and we wrote a little bit about what happened. Then we chose our favourite photos and some people volunteered to read their stories onto this Voicethread. You can add a comment right there on the Voicethread as well.

The Tale of Peter Rabbit

Today we read the interactive Tale of Peter Rabbit on the iPad.

We liked how we could tap the creatures and they would move. The leaves could grow bigger and you could splat the berries.

We liked the part when Mr McGregor chased Peter Rabbit under the gate and how Peter Rabbit lost his shoes and his coat and he put them up as a scarecrow.

Lots of people liked the part where Peter Rabbit got home and lay down asleep because he had a big day. When you touched him he would snore and he sounded like a pig.

We Can Rebuild

Today we thought of the people in Christchurch.

Here are our thoughts...

We hope that we can rebuild. In a few years it will be a big strong city again.

It is never going to be exactly the same. We hope it is going to be better.

We hope it is going to be stronger.

Munch Crunch

Today we made Talking Tom copy us reading a poem called Munch Munch. The poem had lots of 'ch' words in it.

We found some 'ch' words at the beginning of words like cheese, chair and Christchurch.

We found some 'ch' words in the middle of words like teacher, Richmond and Christchurch.

We found some 'ch' words at the end of words like lunch, much and Christchurch.

We used the free Talking Tom App on Allanah's iPad.

Weetbix Tryathlon

This weekend there was a Weetbix Tryathlon down at Tahunanui. First of all we did the swim in groups of about fifteen at a time. Then we ran to our bikes and pushed it out of the bike racks. We jumped on it and did two circuits. And then we parked out bikes and took off our helmets and then we ran the last circuit.

We all got a medal. Appleby School won $500 for sports equipment. Ww would like to buy paintball guns. We'll see!