One of the ESOL groups decided food was a good way of exploring language. We do a lot of talking and reading and writing about food and produce something once a week.

Here are some of our attempts.

Pencil Tops

We were introduced to the work of YouTube star Wengie. She produces edible school supplies so lollies can be snuck in to class. We followed her directions to make pencil toppers.

Happy Cake

The Ready to Reading publishing arm of the New Zealand Ministry of Education put our a book several years ago called You Can Make a Happy Cake. It is probably a happy cake because of the sugar rush that it produces as well as the smiley face that is generally stenciled on top.

Here is one of the stories we wrote about making the cake.

Edible Slime

We watched many different clips about making edible slime. We gave it a go and thought afterwards how we might improve next time.

Pizza

Yesterday we made pizza at ESOL. My pizza had tomato sauce, cheese, sausage and pita bread. My buddy was Annie. Our pizza was delicious. Thank you, Ms Finikin.

Alice

My pizza

Yesterday, on 28.8.18, my ESOL group did their own pizza. My pizza contained three mushrooms, five sausages, lots of cheese and some tomato sauce. My pizza went first because there was ham and I am not allowed ham. Thanx, Ms Finikin.

Abdel

We made slime. It took us four tries. After the second try, we asked Ms Taylor. She makes slime a lot. We got more information and were able to write better recipes. Our third attempts were too stiff. We asked again and refined and our fourth attempts were much better.

Here are some stories about our winter holidays.

Here are some stories some of us wrote. Two of us wrote about Little Dinosaur and his ongoing adventures. Two of us wrote about Bangers and Mash.

Little Dinosaur has a whole series written about him by Hugh Price.

Bangers and Mash also have a big series about them. The books are older than Ms Finikin but they are really cool, and out of print 🙁
We are happy to have found some on YouTube, even though it is not the same as reading them.

We researched information about our chosen dinosaur. We struggled with the idea of ‘millions of years ago’. It turns out this means even before Ms Finikin was born. Here we are reading our dinosaur facts. There is a PDF of our sheets underneath.

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The younger children looked through the book The Shape Game by Anthony Browne.

We talked heaps about the cool pictures. At the end the boys played a game where one boy drew a shape and the other turned it in to a picture.
Ms Finikin drew a shape for us and we created our own pictures.

We have been learning about dinosaurs.

We have done different activities around them.

Here are some pictures of the quiz one group did.
T-rex beat Ankylosaur 22-19.

Another group was looking at a cool book given to Ms Finikin by her sister one Christmas. It had some dinosaur origami in it. It was tricky following the drawn instructions so the group watched a video of it and followed along. There was lots of clarifying and requesting help and supporting each other.

Here we are getting excited about the dinosaur books we are sharing.

We combined the two top groups. Our expert explained how the Amazing Capsule Creatures work.

We followed directions and put in our dinosaur pellets.

We got a gallimimus, an anteater, a rhinoceros and a wolf. Only one of those is a dinosaur.

We read The Race to Green End by Beverley Randell.

We went home and made our own games.
Here are a couple of them. The PDF is under the picture so you can print and play.

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We had some varied holidays. Here are some of our stories.