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.

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.

Welcome Room 6, 2016

 We have had a wonderful first two weeks.

Our visits to Life Education (Harold's) Caravan, were exciting and we will continue this work in the classroom around: feelings, being a friend and learn a bit about emotions and the human brain.












Dr. Oliver places a body organ in the correct place on carpet kid.

 Our tennis programme has also begun. The focus is on building hand-eye co-ordination and learning the basics of tennis for all of the children.

Max in 'ready' position.

Some children will build up to playing short games of tennis in a ladder competition. The coaches and teachers will work with the children at their own level of tennis experience.

The children and I loved our first session. Myself and the coaches were a little like the automatic ball throwing machines. The coaches were very skilled, my children got an extra go as many of my pitches were hopeless. I ended up with balls everywhere and kept getting hit. That's why there is no video of that particular part of the session, not until my lack of hand-eye co-ordination is ironed out.

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.