Te RITO 2 is blossoming!

This week's burst of sunshine has brought out the blossom around school and home and it feels like we are blossoming too! Check out all the Onto-it learning Te RITO 2 have been doing this term:

Our countdown to our Antarctic Centre finally got to 0 this week and what a fantastic trip it was!

This week was also Red Nose Day, we dressed in red and raised money for Cure Kids by buying red noses! check us out!

During all these exciting trips and dress up days (don't forget Daffidol Day this Friday). We have also been working really hard on our learning. 

This term we have been focusing on being good thinkers using our thinking hats, all five senses as well as asking good questions. This week during our Antarctic Centre, all that practice came in handy when we used our question wall to help us think of tricky questions to ask the wonderful educators. 

Check out the tabs on the top of the page for some our recent descriptive writing and our maths lessons on educreations.

Project Friendship Week

This week at Richmond School, we celebrated Project Friendship week and today we dressed up for change in our favourite costume or clothes. Lots of RITO kids chose to wear special clothes from their culture, we also had Michael Jackson and Darth Vader! Volunteer Service Aboard's fundraising friendship bracelets were also very popular as a sign of 'friendship' to our pacific neighbours!

Koi Te Hinengaro - Sharpen the Mind

We started Koi te Hinegaro interchange last week, here are some photos from my first group of NZSL learners. I was so impressed with how fast they learnt new signs and how eager to learn another language these RITO tamariki were!

Can't wait until next week...

Collaborative Writing

For the first two weeks of this term, we have been 'working on writing' during the Daily 5. We have been using google drive on the iPads write creative stories in small groups via a shared document. We had to overcome a few hurdles - like what do we do when two people want to write in the document at once. We figured out a way to take turns and work in smaller groups rather than the whole class. Here are some of the stories we've written:

Mermaids

Once upon there was four mermaids.They wanted to live on land but they could not.There was a bad mermaid that lived under the sea. One mermaid came to the bad mermaid but the other mermaids saw her and said stop! Then the mermaid heard them so she swam as fast as she could away from the bad mermaids and they lived happily ever after.

Monsters

We are monsters. We are hungry. We will eat Seth and James. So the 4 monsters go turn Seth and James into ice cream. "That was yummy." then they said “dumdum!Dum!!DUMM!! because they loved Seth and James ice cream.

Smurfs

One day there were 1000s and 1000s of smurfs.One day papa smurf set them off on a journey. He wanted to make a potion. Right at that moment a smurf rang immediately he started talking . "Papa smurf there has been a mistake the enemy Is chasing us. I'll  come get ya." he said.

Our next step is to learn about narrative structure, characters, setting, problem and solution so that our stories have a beginning, middle and a end. Good thing we are writing narrative later this term!!

Now for work on writing we are going to put some of our learning about descriptions to the test by writing some Guess who? Descriptions. Watch the kids blog, in a few weeks to see if you can guess who we are describing!