Our Tanka Poems about the Beach

We enjoyed hearing Angus' and Theo's poems that they put on the school blog on the school website. We were so inspired we wrote our own poems just like theirs.

Here is the slideshow of our beach trip with us reading the poems we wrote. We hope you enjoy them.

Rock Pools

Shell Study

Room 9 are working on a shell study, we will be drawing shells to scale and enlarging and reducing shells for our art and mathematics work. We are measuring shells in everyway possible and thinking about the beauty of shells, how shells have been used by people and how appreciating shells can bring science and art together. We have bought some context and purpose to this study thinking about how shells are collected and studied in the real world. The Smithsonian Museum has the biggest shell collection in the world. We will make our own shell museum display for everyone to come and see. We have learnt to measure shells length and width. We found it hard to measure the shells as they had curved faces so Mrs Walker taught us to measure curved surfaces with string and our ruler. Then we learnt about perimeter and measured this. We will weigh our shells and then we will use displacement to find the volume of our shells. At the beginning this work was difficult but with practise everyone has mastered measurement and the classroom has such a quiet hum as all of the children explore their own shell investigations and collect measurements of their favourite shells.

Living or Non-Living

Today Room 9 have explored a definition for living and non-living things, what amazing thinkers! The change and development of these types of discussions over the year has been amazing to be a part of.

We talked about some of our ideas about what defines something as living or non-living. We watched this video of Cookie Monster's definition. Then we sorted pictures of objects. Our most interesting discussions were around fire, the sun, seeds. We talked about how a scientist would define a living organism and how writers sometimes talk about non-living things as if they are alive, such as rivers and fire. We made lots of connections with our learning about growth and change over time from Term 2, many of the things that we said were not living do grow and change but not from those things purposefully eating.

 

From a scientific point of view the sun and fire are not living as they are not made up of cells. Some children asked about Earth, if the Sun is living then Earth could be because it changes and grows. Other children recognised that these things didn't really breathe and eat. 

What about seeds? We had the most amazing discussion, the children talked for a long time about the potential life of the seed. We connected this with our poppy growing, some seeds did not germinate and others do because seed can die (become sterile). Seeds do live off their stored energy.

 More about seeds if anyone at home asks any questions.

Sorting Superhero Qualities

Room 9 were given lots of pictures to sort into groups. There were pictures of superheroes from kids movies, everyday people with roles in our community and children from Room 9. We sorted them in lots of ways. Some of the co-operative groups sorted the pictures into obvious groups.

 

Then everyone was asked to group them again and again, thinking of different categories each time. The co-operative groups started to categorise the pictures into groups based on qualities, helpful, kind, caring, brave etc. The co-operative groups presented their classified groups to the class and explained their thinking. Zara made a comment at the end of the activity, that for this task there was no right or wrong answer. This linked in nicely with our other discussions about failure and being wrong, feeling bad about failure when you have bad luck is being unfair to yourself. In the same way, in lots of tasks there isn't a right or wrong, just lots of different ways of looking at the same things.

Fight or Flight and a Challenge Game

We have been reading about our bodies response to stress or danger. The journal story we read explained how and why we worry and how worry can be good and prevent us being harmed. Marley showed us some data she got from machines which measured heart rate and other indicators of stress we read about in the book. We are all taking our pulse before and after our runs in the morning and enjoying noting this data down also.

We have played a flew rounds of a game called Metamorphosis, in this game the children play paper, scissors, rock to move through a progression of levels. The winners moving on to the next stage of the game and the loser must stay at their current level. We used this game to discuss winning and losing and chance. The children recognised that the game is a game of chance and therefore while it is fun to win, it is not due to any particular skill. The children who won quickly and got to the top level actually enjoyed the game less. We decided this was because if you don't have a few challenges along the way the game isn't very fun. The people that struggled at the bottom didn't enjoy the game either because they couldn't do anything to get better as it was just bad luck that caused them to be stuck on the bottom level for the whole game. The people who enjoyed the game, had some ups and downs on their way to the top level. As a class again we discussed how pointless it is to feel bad or to celebrate victories too much when they are due to chance or luck and that challenges offer us interest in a journey. Without the challenge there is nothing to overcome.

We are beginning to write our own comics with Miss Allnutt, we will be mirroring the same structure in these, a narrative always has a challenge for the characters to overcome. We will be the superheroes in our comics.

Collecting Data on our Challenges

We took data about things that we worry, feel anxious or scared about doing. Mrs Walker will design experiences for us to 'Embrace' these challenges.

These pictures show our data, the column on the left means that is not at all worrying, the middle is ok, the far right column is quite uncomfortable or anxious.

Our first challenge was to 'not know what was happening', to trust someone else to lead us around the playground with our eyes closed.

Then we had to let a group of people catch us as we fell forwards and backwards around a small circle of classmates. 'Reed in the Wind'

The Incredibles

We watched 'The Incredibles'.

It was a surprise and we had to work out what we would be learning about this term.

We talked about what makes a superhero and what didn't in the movie.

It wasn't the superpowers it was what the heroes did with their powers.

They didn't take the easy road, they did what was right even when it was harder. They cared about other people.

We decided that being weak is doing what is easy and what you want for yourself.

Being strong and powerful was hard and you think about other people. Mr Incredible taught us this in the movie.

Timelapse

We have explored the time lapse app 'Lapseit' on our i-Pads.
In small groups we drew, built and made different things and made timelapse movies using lapseit.
We have watched lots of time lapse videos of the stadium being built, fruit rotting, people aging.
On the app, we could control how often the pictures were taken. The children made excellent connections to rate of change. Lapseit is a free app if you have an i-Pad and want to use this at home.

Tim said when you take a time lapse of something like the stadium being built you would only take one picture every few hours. Some of us set the i-Pads to take pictures every 20 milliseconds, we were doing activities that were quick so we had to take a lot of photos in a short space of time.

Exploring Symmetry

People in our class noticed that lots of the kowhaiwhai patterns were symmetrical.

We have talked about symmetry before, but we hadn't explored it. Mrs Walker gave each thinking partner pair a sheet of photocopied pictures that all had lines of symmetry.

We rotated all of them both 1/2 and 1/4 turns to see if they looked any different, or if they looked as if they had been translated.

Some looked the same if they were rotated 1/2 and 1/4 turns.
Some looked the same when they were rotated a 1/2 turn but not a 1/4 turn.
Some you could tell they had been rotated on each and every rotation.

We wondered why, we had to look closely and look for a pattern, which we learnt to do in Term 1 when making observations.

Ryan said all the sides of all of the objects were the same.
Marley said the ones that look the same on 1/2 turns have two opposite sides that are the same.

Mrs Walker said these shapes had rotational symmetry. The number of times a shape is the same as it rotates is called the shapes' order of symmetry. We worked out the order of symmetry for our shapes and images. We have some impressive thinkers in our room.

Thank you Marley and Jacob for leading us on this investigation with your carefully observations and questions.

Lantern Designs

We wanted to design little lanterns for our Matariki night. We have been learning about kowhaiwhai and tukutuku patterns and the beautiful geometry behind this artwork.

We explored so many patterns and the children described what they saw. Some saw fish, arrows, curls, ferns etc. Then we learnt the meanings of some of the more famous patterns. Most people loved patiki (flounder).

Then we learnt about 'translation' as a mathematical word to describe how a shape or pattern moves.
We all got a little game from Mrs Walker and played it with our thinking partner, we had to translate each shape in our game and explain it to our partner, but they were not allowed to look, they had to try to make it from our description.

Later Mrs Walker taught us about rotation, and we were able to link this to our learning about clocks, 1/4 and 1/2 turns, anticlockwise and clockwise.
We added these moves to our game.

Then we learnt about reflection, we are so good at the game now and everyone understands and can use this language.

We made patterns of our own on our lanterns.

Jacob and Marley noticed that in the game sometimes you can't really tell if a shape has been translated or rotated because it looks the same anyway. We wondered why this was so that will be our next investigation.

Sorting and Categorising

We have been sorting rocks into rock classification groups: sedimentary, igneous and metamorphic. Now it is time to sort other knowledge and see if we could understand how the year is organised around the seasons and why.

We have been sorting holidays:

• We have sorted holidays into the different seasons. 
• We have sorted holidays based on whether they are celebrations or commemorations. 
• We have sorted holidays based on why they are celebrated- because of a natural event (like the Matariki constellation) or a holiday of historical or cultural significance (like ANAZC Day). 

Finally we sorted harvest events of the calendar of traditional Maori. We noticed that Spring and Summer were very busy times for harvesting foods. We learnt from Carolena about how different cultural groups traditionally preserved foods. The Romans salted meat to make it keep for longer. Many cultural groups dried foods, including traditional Maori, and we still dry and salt food today.
Mrs Walker taught us about poha and she had a dried gourd for the science table for us to touch, shake and inspect. The gourd, once dried, made an excellent container.  Carolena and William thought cutting the bottom off would make a great bowl.

We could see why Matariki was a good time for the new year to start on the Maori Calendar, because after all of the food gathered in Spring and Summer was preserved and stored for the Winter the colder months didn't require as much work.  Zara said it would have been the perfect time to feast, when food was plentiful and so much work had been done. Marley realised that because it was cold too, they would have wanted to stay inside and work on learning new things. Maita thought everyone would want to have fun and play games, then many children realised that children in particular would have probably spent time playing with titi torea.

Takoha to Vanuatu to Celebrate Matariki

To celebrate Matariki we have been thinking about who we could share some joy with. Marley heard about the crisis in Vanuatu after the cyclone that hit it recently.
Mrs Scott in Room 8 was sent an email about boxes that Blue Coconut would send to Vanuatu for us if we filled them with gifts for a child our age.
Room 8 and 9 brought lots of things to school to donate and we filled ten boxes; ten children in Vanuatu will get a lovely box of presents from us. We even included a letter to them with our email address so we might hear from them one day. It was a really positive experience. Thank you to Mrs Scott for picking up the boxes and taking them down to be picked up by Blue Coconut.

Constant and Change

We have been talking about the concepts of constant and change, and talking about how we measure the passing of time and change over time. We have been enjoying tracing our shadows at different times of the day and seeing how these move across the court as our planet turns in relation to the sun. We have used models to show how this works. We have been enjoying making time-lapse videos on the i-Pads recording group members doing and making things. We have been experimenting changing the frequency of the photos being taken, we can set the i-Pad to take a photo within a certain period of seconds or milliseconds.

Igneous Rocks

Miss Allnutt, our student teacher taught us about igneous rock (rock formed from a volcano) today. Here is a video of the volcano we made in class. Sorry about the orange carpet Mr Hogg.

Egyptian Numbers

Today during maths we learnt about the Ancient Egyptian number system. Gabrielle was excellent at writing numbers using it. We will have another go next week as some of us were just getting the hang of it. It was so much fun.

ANZAC Assembly

 

It was wonderful to see so many families at our ANZAC assembly on Friday. I hope that the learning the children have experienced at school enriches their thinking and reflection over the ANZAC weekend. The class have been full of admiration and pride for the ex-pupils of our school who served in the World Wars. They were surprised to find that many of the surnames on the plaque are names we all know from pupils at our school currently. Before the assembly Room 9 walked past the plaque one more time to reflect on the sacrifice of those with a close connection to all of us.

Poppy Growing

 Thank you to Allison for coming to school to help Room 9 plant poppies. Allison offered us so much more than just planting seeds, she explained germination, seed rot and why the poppies grew in the battlefields after the fighting had stopped.

We worked in small groups to plant our poppies, we watered them and waited. Some children thought the pot would have a plant like the one on the packet quite soon but the packet said it could take ten days just for the seed to germinate.

Room 9 must be good gardeners because our seeds germinated in just 4 days. We had a good strike rate too. Most pots were full of little sprout poppies.

Poppies don't really like to be transplanted but that is what we will be trying to do later in the year.

There were some very proud seed mums and dads in Room 9. Room 9 will teach Room 8 how to plant the poppies so they can join us transplanting the seedlings around the school to remind us of our returned service men and women all year round.

Wrapper Free Snacks for Room 9

We have been noticing things all term and now it was time to do something about what we've noticed. Our maths investigation of rubbish in the school grounds revealed that most rubbish was from lunch wrappers and gladwrap. Room 9 came up with a solution to use little containers for our snacks rather than having snacks that needed wrapping. We designed these with Miss Allnutt and can't wait to use them. If they crack or break they can be recycled but until then we will reuse, reuse, reuse. Marley told us that she gets some good reusable lunch wrappers online, she wraps her sandwiches in them everyday, maybe making some reusable sandwich wrappers could be a future project for the green team. It was a great way to end the term by creating a solution for a problem we had observed.

African Drumming-Listening Carefully

 Room 9 have been discussing 'Observation' a lot this term and how to be an explorer of the world.

This term, these have been our rules to learn by:

• Always be looking.
• Everything is interesting- look closer.
• Notice patterns.
• Make connections.
• Use all of your senses (safely) in your investigations: look, listen, smell, touch and taste. 

We have mostly focused on the first four, but today was all about listening and noticing patterns. 
Thank you Mrs Fry for organising these special lessons.