Tennis

We are currently organising a timetable for the Middle Syndicate children to play tennis games at lunchtime and morning teas, the children who wanted to be a part of this have meet together to arrange times around their other commitments such as choir and the Middle Team PALs (Senior children run games for the younger children) sessions.

Here is a link to the Maori Hill School page on the TennisPlus website. It has a short video of our tournament.

Any families interested in taking tennis further with coaching outside of school can attend the free sessions towards the end of each term. Information is available at http://tennisplusdunedin.org/free/

Light and Sight

After our visit from Julie and our sharing of the Home Learning projects on the senses, we had some questions about how sight works.

We talked about when it is easier to see and when it isn't. We realised that without light we can not see. Mrs Walker told us about restaurants that you can eat in, in the pitch black. We decided that when we fill our marble jar that was the experience we all want to have. So when it is full, Room 6 will become a 'Black-Out Restaurant'.

Our first questions is..."Are some colours easier to see than others in low-light?"

We used the last few cake boxes to paste different coloured paper and objects, different textured papers and some sparkly and fluro items.

We cut a peep-hole to view the objects through.

While our groups worked on this, Mrs Walker helped small groups use the optic and light set to, create and test theories about how light worked. We came up with some great theories and tested them. One group made a light circuit using prisms to bend light around in a circuit.

Magic Boxes

Each child in Room 6 have been working on creating a world of their own in small cake boxes. It has been a big work of collage with lots of co-operation, collaboration and creativity to create the world each child imagined in their head.

On the outside of our box is a picture of our head, with a little story introducing us and ourselves as writers.

Inside the box, the children have worked with Kit Wright's poem 'The Magic Box' and written their own beautiful versions. The poems are stunning; what a creative bunch we are.

Julie Woods

We had a visit from Julie Woods (That Blind Woman) came to visit the Middle Team. She was so inspiring and funny. The children loved her.
She talked to us about peoples' perceptions of people with visual impairments, she talked about everything she has learnt and is grateful for.
She told us about Louis Braille and how Braille came to be, she wrote each of the children's names on a small card with the Braille alphabet written on it. The children were very excited and spent morning tea time writing in Braille using the alphabet card.

Our visit from Julie launches our work into perception, we have talked about perspective and perception when looking at optical illusions and creating our own worlds in boxes (what is a dream world to each of us). The next phase of this work will be to look at how perceptions and perspectives are created, through our senses and our brain making sense of the information the senses gather. We are beginning by looking at sight and light.

Optical Illusion Investigations

We have been looking at different optical illusions. We were interested in how different people in the class might perceive these optical illusions and our statistical questions.

We made up questions and put them next to the optical illusions. Then we all went around the classroom and placed a tally mark for our answers.

Some of the illusions Mrs Walker asked the questions and we sorted our answers because the optical illusions could be percieved really differently and there were too many responses to make just a few categories and some people saw more than just one thing. We had to make categories from the responses.

To do this we each used a piece of paper to place on the carpet a bit like a pictograph. This way we could add as many pieces of paper as each of us needed.





Then we worked in groups to make our own pictographs.
The groups displayed the data in ways that made sense to them. We talked about why we need to make graphs, to visually communicate the data to others.














Then Mrs Walker taught us to use the app Numbers on the i-Pad (like excel). In our groups we made a table with our data for the Mexican's illusion. We made bar graphs using these tables, some groups played around with the app and made all sorts of graphs. Estee's group tried to make a 3D bar graph but some of the categories were not showing so we decided it wasn't a good one to communicate with other people. We talked about changing the values on the axis so that these made sense. If we didn't change the values, some of the values were decimal numbers. We knew we couldn't have this as our data represented people and we couldn't have 4.6 people. We had lots of laughs about some of the values that we had to fix.