The Creatures in the Classroom.

We have created our own creatures. First we folded some paper and drew a picture using 3 different animal parts. We had to make this our best work. Then we outlined the picture with vivid. After we cut it out we glued it onto a black piece of paper. The next day we wrote a story about our creature. We had to describe what our creature looked like and what it did. Some of us added what it was scared of and where they found it. Once we had reworked our story to add more adjectives and correct sentences, and edited all our mistakes we had to publish our work as neatly as possible. Mrs Craib then laminated our creature and story to put it on the wall. We read our stories to each other with our best acting voices, this means with expression, good pace and wonderful volume. WE HAD A CELEBRATION!

Room 9 reporters.

Mathletics

The children of Room 9 are signed up and ready to challenge other people in Math. We are part of the Mathletics competition. Every day we go onto the computers to the website www.mathletics.co.nz to complete our challenges. The challenges are fun. Sometimes they're hard and tricky. After we've finished our challenges we can play live mathletics. We feel really proud when we have achieved a certificate. Some of us have bronze awards already.

James Hay Theatre Performance

Last Thursday night we went to perform our Salsa dancing at the James Hay Theatre. We have been learning Salsa dancing for eight weeks on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

At first Mrs Craib had to wait for the Addington children to arrive. After a few minutes we went up the steps to go into the James Hay theatre. We were the first school to be seated. We waited and then other schools came. Donna, our dance teacher, arrived and she had some sparkles to put in our hair. Then the announcer, Aaron Gilmour, came on to the stage. He came to talk to us because we were the first school to dance. He was very funny. When the show started Aaaron Gilmour showed us the up stairs and the down stairs. We had to walk onto the stage with our arms on our hips with our partner beside us. The other schools watched us perform as well as our parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and our sisters and brothers. Everyone clapped and cheered.

There was a crowd and it made me feel confident. I enjoyed dancing on stage in front of heaps of people.

Reporters: Sheena Peng and Jaye Warren-Cheung

Salsa Dancing

This month room 9 is learning Salsa dancing. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays Donna and Char teach us and we practise in the hall. We have learnt how to do the Casper slide and Cotton Eye Jo at the start as a warm up. A couple of weeks ago we got to pick who we wanted as our partner to dance the merengue. There is a leader and a follower. It was hard work when we started to learn the dance then it got easier and easier as we practised. We have new dance moves each week to add to our routine.

When Char came to teach us she taught us a new warm up. We had to get in a line and walk around. It was so much fun we were all laughing and giggling.

We have a line we have to be in when we go onto the stage and we have practised walking on with our partners. At the end of every session Donna and Mrs Craib get to pick who takes the trophy home. If you want to take the trophy home you have to show the Addington Attitude.

One day Donna brought her parrot to show us because we had worked so hard. It could talk and shake its head.

It is only 3 more weeks until we go to the James Hay Theatre to perform our dance. We have to be at the theatre at quarter past 5 and we start dancing at 6 o’clock. There will be heaps of people there. We will get there by bus. We will have lots of fun while we are dancing.

I am really proud of myself and feel excited about going to perform.

By: Jacob, Serena, Skye and Tyler

Thinking Hats

Thinking hats are one of Room 9’s thinking tools. On Wednesday 12^th May we used our thinking hats to discuss plastic bags. The first hat we used was black hat. Black hat means we need to think about the bad points. Some of the black hat answers were that the bags would suffocate us, they break easily, are not good for the environment and they don’t decompose. Next we used the yellow hat. This is about the good points. Plastic bags are good to recycle and use again when you go shopping. Then we used our white hat to think about the facts. We found out that plastic bags are made from oil. After that we used our green hat thinking, which is to think outside the box. When we are creative we can make kites out of plastic bags, use them as bike seat covers when your seat is wet and a hair-dyeing apron. We also used blue hat thinking, which is thinking about thinking. With this you should pick them up. The final one was the red hat. With the red hat you use your feelings. We don’t like finding the plastic bags blowing around our environment.

We enjoy using our thinking hats to think about topics.

By: Isobel, Sheena, KimiYa

Tactix visit.

On Tuesday 18^th May Victoria Smith from the Tactix netball team came to visit our school with people from ANZ. The ANZ sponsored her to come and host a shoot off with us. There were two hoops for the competition. Only one person would win. Everyone would get two shots and if you got one in you got to enter the final. First we had to get into a line. We had two teams, rooms 8 and 9 and rooms 10 and 11. When we got the ball we tried to throw it through the hoop. If you got the ball in the hoop you got to stand by one of the men so you could go into the next round. If you missed the hoop you had to go to the back of the hall and at the table you got a poster and boomsticks. Lots of us got into the finals. Zania won the mega prize. It was a netball. She was great at netball. All the others got a drink bottle. We were allowed to get the boomsticks, posters and bottles signed by Victoria. Some of us got our arms and hands autographed too. It was a huge competition. It was all about having fun and following Mrs Craib’s dream. We loved playing ANZ netball with Victoria Smith.

By: Claire, KC, Lucas and Sam

Cross Country

Team Maui Cross Country

Cross-country is a thing when you run a long way. But at Addington school we made a track that went from our playground, past the office, behind room 9- 10- 11, in the playground near the road, around and back to the school grounds. There were three races, the “high heel walkers” competitive runners and non competitive. The walkers had to walk but the non-competitive and competitive had to run. All of us were exhausted after our races. Then we cheered for the competitive group. At the end Mr Leslie called out the people who got a place. We all went to the park to play and then later we had lunch. We were very tired because the whole thing was tiring. Some of the children are going to the Zones at Halswell Quarry. Cross-country is good because you get to exercise and get energised. That’s why we like cross-country.

By Caroline, Emily and Jamie

Year 4 Camp

On Thursday we went to stay at the South Brighton Holiday park. First we went to the beach and had a scavenger hunt. While we were doing this, a man caught a shark and we got to throw it back into the water. Lots of us had turns at swinging it in. We made sandcastles and buried Ms Walker in the sand. She was a mermaid. Tasi and Serena were supposed to get a bucket of water to make the sand wet, but they were fighting over it and the water went all over Ms Walker’s face! After that we had a swim and got to jump out in the waves.

We went to the camping ground and got to sleep in cabins with our friends.

The playgrounds were fun especially the one at Kibblewhite park because it had a flying fox.

We went for a Nature walk on Friday and tried to find the birds on the estuary.

We dug up lots of crabs and they nipped some of us.

Thank you to our wonderful helpers – Juanita, Amy, Aimee, Tony, Bill, Emma, Miss Sanders, Ms Walker and Mrs Craib.

Our camp was lots of fun

Softball Sessions with Room 9

Christina came to our school and taught us how to play softball. We learned how to throw the ball correctly and how to catch it with a glove. We had lots of fun.
We played a game where we had to crouch and move to the side. We had to beat Christina to the other side of the hall. We almost won!

Written language in Room 9

We have a wonderful new writing programme that we do every day. We sit in a donut circle and talk about the topic. Mrs Craib tells us the things we are to talk about and we have to quickly tell our partner. Then she writes some of the things we say into our modelling book so we can look back and get ideas. Then we write as much as we can for 10 minutes - some of us need to remember fullstops and capital letters but most of us are trying to write more than 6 sentences. We have to work quickly. After the timer has gone we have to edit our work by checking the punctuation and the spelling. Our favourite part is counting how many words we have written and colouring in the graph in the back of our books.