The whole of HokowhituESOL squeezed into the ESOL room to sing ‘Pond Animals’ by Radha Sahar. The music is part of ‘Word Detective’, available from http://spelling.co.nz/

Ms Finikin is writing a book review for the TESOLANZ magazine. http://www.tesolanz.org.nz

The three books being reviewed are from The Book Next Door

We are helping her.

We decided we wanted to do some experiments in ESOL. We looked through books and came up with things to try. Katia remembered a cool thing she made once. We worked in pairs and followed verbal directions to make our phones.

Ms Finikin brought a spinning top from school. Her friend bought it from Jaycar and Ms Finikin bought it off him at his garage sale. Here are our ideas about it.

We read a book called The Mask Parade. At the end of the book the mayor presented awards to the participants. We wondered what a mayor could be. We saw the mayor had a chain. We wondered how we could learn about mayors. We wrote to our mayor, Grant Smith, to ask him about his job.

We bid farewell to one of our buddies as she headed off to her new life in Hamilton. He new house is close to a big park and she is looking forward to spending time at it and her new school.

Ms Oida’s English class sent us some letters from Japan. They were very cool. We got Shoki’s dad to help us with some of the translating. Here are our replies. We beeped out our names to be net-safe.

Here is our entry to the 2015 Digi Awards.

As part of our overall theme of art this term we looked at super heroes. We found out that, while childre range in size from four to 5 heads tall and adults tend to be six heads tall, super heroes tend to be drawn as eight heads tall, making them look like very tall, not-quite-human people.
https://classes.soe.ucsc.edu/cmps025/Spring11/Draw-Comics-The-Marvel-Way.pdf
We looked at the Lego super heroes and worked out they are three heads tall.
We created our own super heroes, gave them back stories, then sent them on adventures.

We had read My Two Blankets by Irena Kobald and Freya Blackwood. This book is about a girl having to leave her country because of war and her experiences in her new country. The words of this new country are a waterfall of sound and she is very unhappy. She wraps herself in a blanket of what she knows – words, ideas, things of importance. As she integrates in to her new country, she creates a second blanket for herself. We created our own blankets of what is important to us. we wrote about them and shared our work with Ruma Waru.

For whatever reason, the country the child arrived in did not seem to have the support available that New Zealand does.

www.redcross.org.nz/what-we-do/in-new-zealand/refugee-services/
http://englishlanguage.org.nz/
http://www.alpn.org.nz/