The last couple of weeks we have been out exploring the garden with magnifying glasses, helping weed the gardens and watering the plants. There are always bugs to be found and observed!
Another garden experience was making a perfume using the scented flowers and leaves in the garden. This idea came from a beautiful book Carrie brought to school called Play Wild by Rachel Clare.
This week at Discovery time we made pasta. The ingredients are very simple: 1 egg per 100 grams of flour, but it takes a lot of kneading to get the dough soft and then lots of rolling to turn it into noodles. Lucky there were lots of helping hands!
At Discovery time it is a great opportunity to celebrate the many cultures of our school. For our Diwali celebrations we made pilau rice and tasted barfi, both were delicious! We also had henna decorations done on our hands, we made flower mandala patterns and all performed a dance. It was a very busy and exciting Discovery Time!
This week at Discovery Time we made Kawakawa Biscuits. Rimu Nui children got involved in the whole process from measuring the ingredients using scales and measuring cups and spoons, cutting up the kawakawa and mixing and shaping. We all enjoyed our morning tea treat!
As we have been looking at invertebrates in class, we had some special visitors to class to observe. On the first week we had snails and slugs and the second week we found decomposers in the compost. The creatures doing the “chewing and pooing” to make soil. Some children made bugs out of construction materials, and some collected garden waste to feed the decomposers.
Today we made a Tongan fruit drink ‘Otai. It was lovely to see children helping each other to grate, blend, pour and stir.
It was delicious!
This week was Maths week so we had a time themed Discovery Time. We read a funny story “The Time it Took Tom” and then timed each other doing different activities. We discovered we have some very fast people in Rimu Nui! We also made a picture half day and half night.
Fantastic effort in dressing up Room 6! Every one looked wonderful in their costumes.
For the Olympics we tried out lots of different activities including throwing bean bags, ti kouka (cabbage tree) rounds and ping pong balls at and through different objects. Some Rimu Nui children invented new game out of the equipment provided. Others made medals to give out. We finished the morning with a tug of war.
For International Languages Week Mrs Bhatia taught us how to make roti. You can see how we rolled the dough into neat circles before it was cooked in a hot pan.
We tasted the roti with some potato curry and it was delicious!
Some children made signs to say hello in lots of different languages, and another group of children made a puppet show.