Streeeeeetching Sentences

Throughout the year we are focusing on using description to enhance our writing across genres.  We have started writing descriptive paragraphs to go with our science inquiry.  Our initial sentences were a little boring so Mrs P set us a challenge.  In groups we were given one of the sentences that many of us had used in our initial paragraphs.  The sentence we were given was:  The Nikau Palm is a tree.  I think you will all agree that this sentence could be improved upon!  We then got to chop up this sentence and add/delete/rearrange words until we were satisifed that we had made an awesome descriptive sentence.  Here are some of the sentences we came up with.

We all really enjoyed this activity and then went back and worked on stretching some of the sentences in our individual writing.  Now we are going to look at starting sentences in a variety of ways to add interest.

Place Value Problem Solving

In Mamaku we love working in cooperative groups.  This week we completed two different place value problem solving activities in our cooperative teams.  On Tuesday we did a problem solving race solving problems like the one below.  We had seven problems to solve together.  

Then on Friday we did an open-ended problem solving challenge where we had to come up with as many different solutions to the given problem that we could.  Check out our individual blogs to see all of the amazing solutions we came up with.