Ancient Egypt History And Mysteries

Room 7 were interested in Ancient Egypt. We used this as a topic for our reading contract. We learnt about the mummification process and decided to have a go. Here are our mummified tomatoes.

Spray Frames

Finally all of our frames and surreal art is finished.

This was a new experience for me. Never during my career I have I spray painted with a class. Although I learnt a lot about managing spray painting with 28 enthusiastic artists, I will not require this learning in the future. The main thing I think we all learnt was it was smelly. It was also a lot of fun and the frames that we made look amazing. I have managed to remove the paint from all of the places that we did not want to spray paint and Mr Hogg has almost forgiven us for the general chaos. Not really a spray and walk away type situation.

Each frame has pegs for the writing of our artists to be displayed through out the year.

Statistics

We have been working on building understandings around concepts in Statistics through investigations over the term.

It has been messy but really worthwhile. Two teachers from Balmacewen Intermediate came to visit our classroom to see what we have been exploring and how we are learning through investigation rather than content delivered directly from the teacher. It is easy to forget as adults that the knowledge we value most was probably not just served up to us on a plate. The joy in learning is in the discovery and we feel really proud of this learning because it is evidence to us of what a creative meaning maker we can be.

Rather than learning about graphs Room 7 were challenged to build ramps for marbles to run down. They had to try to create a ramp which was as consistent as they could.

Each group collected all of their data and tried to communicate it with the class. There were a lot of interesting ways. Most people used bar graphs because that was what they knew. This led to a lot of interesting discussions about why there are so many different types of graphs. We then learnt about scatter graphs (which are used to find correlation). We collected and displayed two more sets of data and each time we realised why features we see on graphs have to be there.

In our mathematics groups we have been looking at the value of numbers and this real life experience of collecting and recording data with accuracy brought rich understandings to the implications of rounding and what an impact that can have to the way data might look.

We realised that all of this really matters as people could really mislead others depending how they treat the data. We learnt to find trends in the data, use this to make predictions and all about outliers.

Next we learnt about some of the places in the real world where statistics can save lives. It is the 100 year anniversary of the Influenza epidemic. We read about the cholera outbreak in Soho which led to the invention of epidemiology and demographics and looked at some of this first work to try to understand what was causing people to become sick. Using simulators the class changed variables to see what would happen to a fake population. We discussed how technology gives a way to use data to test possibilities without anyone getting hurt.

As we came to the end of this amazing work Mrs Walker came down with a stomach bug. Fear was in the eyes of many people believing they might be looking at patient zero. Thank you for your concern Room 7; it was not cholera, I do go to a lot of effort to make learning meaningful but not that far!

This worked as sparked some questions about measures of central tendency which we will learn about this week. You can use the simulators with your children, they are linked on the Theme page of this blog.

A Quarter of Zero

I am sorry that it has taken me so long to post anything to our blog. I have a lot to post so look forward to many catch up posts in the next few weeks.

Room 7 performed to the residents of Yvette William's Retirement Village on Tuesday.
The performance was completely a collaboration by the students. Everyone offering their ideas and skills. We performed two songs. While a lot of work went into the songs, especially by our guitarists, we were not worried about it being perfect. We decided we really wanted to bring a bit of joy to our audience. Five boys dressed up as the Beatles (and their manager) for our '8 Days a Week' performance. On the way home the manager was questioned about payment. He promised each a quarter of what we made. I said, "I'm affraid you made nothing."

Such a positive bunch in Room 7, "a quarter of zero then..."

I have emailed the videos of the performance but added a picture here as the videos were too large. Thank you so much to the parents who came on this trip, we hope you had a great laugh too.

We have also been enjoying several sessions with our Sports Activator, Naomi. We have been doing lots of activities that involve teamwork, communication and adapting to things when there is a challenge.

Flower Power

Our thinking partners were challenged to use found garden materials and some crafty bits and bobs to make our own version of a vascular flowering plant diagram. The children had to use the correct scientific words for the parts of the plant as they created their diagram.

Representing roles in Ancient Greek and Traditional Maori Societies

 At the end of term 3 we explored how we could use shapes to demonstrate how societies were organised in Pre-European Maori society and in the different Polis of Ancient Greece.

Here are some of the representations the children made in their thinking partnerships.

We tried to show population with the area of the shape used in each section of society. We found lots of interesting similarities and differences in the societies we learnt about. We talked about what was fair, good or bad for different groups of people.

We also talked about how some things in our society today have been influenced by some of these ideas.

Marae Trip

Here is a slide show of our Noho Marae, I tried to make it mostly Room 6 children. Your son or daughter should be able to tell you about what we are doing in the photos.

Soup and Fruit Salad Making

I realised I never put the photos of us making soup on our blog.

Here are some of them... thank you to Rebecca and Niamh for your help.

Athenian Society

Today we watched this video about how different groups in Ancient Greece were organised, who had the power and we talked about how this affected the cultures of these different groups of people. Our work in philosophy has obviously paid off as the class were able to talk about what was good or bad about different systems and what was fair or unfair. Tyne thought it was good that in Athens everyone had a chance to say what they thought because it would make everyone think more and the society would be smarter. Zara still thought it was unfair because the women didn't get to speak. Everyone was grateful not to live in such tough times, we thought life as a slave would be terrible in all of the societies, especially in Sparta. Max was very interested in the Macedonians and why and how they managed to take over Sparta and Athens. As a class we are deciding which book we will read aloud, we decided to do this Athenian style, we have put all of the options on the board. Everyone has a chance to try to persuade everyone to vote for the one they like best and then we will have a vote, in Room 6 everyone will get a vote. Over the week we will learn to represent the power in these societies in diagrams.

Reflective and Rotational Symmetry

We have been exploring symmetry.

We made some artwork based on Reuben Patterson's glitter work. Lots of the children had visited the 'Dotty Room' at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery. We made little circle artworks using reflective and rotational symmetry to create a cool pattern with golden paper.

Then we worked with our thinking partners to explore rotational symmetry. We sorted different pictures and tried to work out the order of rotational symmetry each picture had (if it had rotational symmetry). Some people were very interested in shapes like circles that are the same all the way around. Should we say they have an order of 1? or even none?

Mrs Walker told us a circle has degrees and some people are interested to find out more about this. We will have to do another investigation next term into this. Great thinking Room 6.

My Place

Thank you to all of the families who came to the morning tea with the residents of Summerset. After the morning tea we took a photo of the class with their finished 'My Place' historical picture books. Sara (Toitu Museum Educator) came to visit us last Friday. She was very impressed with our work and has asked for some copies of the children's work to go on the Toitu website.

Here are some happy memories from our learning around our exploration of 'Perspective and Perception'. The children have gained so much from experiences that required them to put themselves in other people's shoes (or heads).

Black-Out Restaurant

Mrs Walker told us about famous Black Out Restaurants you can visit overseas. http://london.danslenoir.com/ 

We wanted to try one when we filled out Marble Jar. 

Estee has written the following blog post about our experience and sports activator session on large ball skills. Thank you Estee.

Last week, we had a Black-Out Restaurant. You would want to be there to see some of the reactions; they were funny. We were blind folded and we had to taste: fejoia, banana, olives, muscles, lollies, doughnuts and cheese.  We also got sore eyes from the blind folds. 

We also had a sports activator session with Naomi. We were learning about how you can catch. We learnt passes like the bounce pass, the chest pass and the over-head pass. We had a competition. We had to pass the ball without dropping it; it was fun.