Swimming

We were all delighted to get a couple of weeks of swimming instruction recently especially because the Milton pool had been closed for so long. We were also fortunate that the weather stayed fine for us so that we only missed one of the ten swimming days we had scheduled. In this block of swimming, we focus on practising the basic swimming strokes eg freestyle and backstroke. We use equipment such as floatboards to work on our leg action and once we have mastered that we go on to work on arm action and breathing. Many children made tremendous progress. and some of our best swimmers will compete in the Otago champs on Saturday. At the end of the year we will have another block of swimming when the focus will be on water safety.

Sports Activator

This year we have a new sports activator. During the last few weeks she has visited twice. She has been teaching us the skills that we need to play tennis. First we played games called Octopus and another called Line Tag to help us warm up. Some of the activities we have done to practise keeping our eyes on the ball and ball control have been balancing the ball on the racket, rolling it around the tennis racket without dropping it, one bounce/one hit, and small hits just above your head. We also played a game called Splat! Next we worked in pairs and practised hitting the ball over the net to each other and counting how many times we could do that successfully. We also played hand tennis with our partner. We learnt how to hold a racquet properly and some of the rules of tennis. All of us enjoyed the sessions and are looking forward to the sports activator’s next visit.

School Fair

On Saturday 5th March Milton Primary School had its school fair. This year’s fair had a country theme and there were a lot of country themed activities. There were a lot of fun things to do including sponge throw, paintball, horse riding, and many other interesting activities. Lots of people also contributed to the raffles.  The sponge throw was really fun and the willing victims got thoroughly soaked. In the paintball you had to shoot the paintballs and some lucky people knocked off a drink and got to keep it. Thank you to those who donated the wonderful prizes for the raffles. In the horse riding there were three horses, Pearl, Sharky and Caesar. It was awesome how your body bobbed up and down all the time. In the Fire Engine it was very loud and whoever got in the front seat got to press the button for the siren and it was so loud. This year we had a sawdust dig and if you found a token you would get a chocolate bar and if you found a butterfly you would get a prize. Also there was a baking sale and there were a lot of sweets to buy. We also had the heli drop and  since we had some guests from the Otago rugby team they did the heli drop. Thanks to all the people who contributed to help set everything up. It was a massive fundraiser for the school.  

  

Geometry

In geometry, we have been learning about the properties of 2-D and 3-D shapes. We have learnt that the flat surfaces on a 3-D shape are called faces, and the pointy bits are called vertices. We have learnt the names of some 3-D shapes and how to recognise them from flat representations of themselves called nets. There are a lot of new words to learn in like parallel, perpendicular and congruent. We have been learning to use the language of geometry to describe 3-D shapes like the ones you can see in this photo.