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.

Reflecting Light

We have investigated two questions in our science work. One question we had was about colour and if different colours were easier to see in low light. We know that without light we can not see. We wondered if we put different colour and types of paper inside boxes and cut a tiny peep hole in the box to see if some colours were easier to see than others.




We found that the shiny, sparkly (reflecting) papers, like foil etc were easy to see as the light bounced off them. We also noticed that dark colours on light and light colours on dark were easier to see. We talked about contrast and decided that lots of things like books are easier to read when print contrasts with the background colour.

To investigate reflection more we decided to play with mirrors one afternoon. With our thinking partners we took two mirrors and observed the light from the objects reflecting from one to the other, making a repeating image (to our eyes). We discussed the amazing phenomena of light our sight, that all images are reflected light bouncing off objects and traveling to our eyes. We did talk about colour too but this scientific concept is quite advanced, however, some children understood this.

Reflecting light to the ceiling, even through the classroom window (refraction).

We made some amazing discoveries and had lots of fun. We also realised that we (humans) get the best show in the world, we looked at how other animals see and what other light spectrums would look like. We all agreed that we are very fortunate to not only sense our world but to sense it in such a vibrant and amazing way.

Look at different lights on the electromagnetic light spectrum.

http://www.chromoscope.net/

How a dog sees etc.http://www.sciencealert.com/how-dogs-see-the-world-compared-to-humans

Our Finished Magic Boxes

It was great to see so many of our families at the end of term sharing assembly on the last Friday of the term. If you were not able to make it, here are a few photos of the inside worlds we created in our boxes which we shared along with our poems.

The children are now working on historical fiction picture books. This is the culmination of all of their learning about changes overtime to Dunedin and appreciating how the time we live in changes our perceptions. The children have been really enjoying the work and getting into character and the minds of a child living in Dunedin during each time period we learn about.

All of the map drawing work we have done has come in handy as the children draw maps, write a recount and draw objects of everyday life from each period of time. We are basing our books around what we have seen Nadia Wheatley do in her book about a small town in Australia. A picture of one of the time spreads from her book is below.