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.

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.