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. 

Tiddlywinks Treat

 Room 9 filled their marble jar - awesome teamwork Room 9!

As a reward the children voted on a boys vs girls game, so Mrs Walker had to think of one.

I decided everyone would love tiddlywinks and I was right. Lots of the children hadn't seen the game before so they really enjoyed it.

We included it in our math focus on Friday. Each team (boys and girls) had a player go up and flick their tiddlywink. If they were not happy with their shot, they got one more chance but you had to accept your second score.

Mrs Walker wrote a scale of centimeters on the carpet with chalk (sorry Mr Hogg). The children got a great sense of distance between 2 and 3 metres. We discussed the likelihood of getting a 4 or 5 metre jump and everyone agreed it was unlikely but we couldn't say it was impossible- we've been reading a book about probability, can you tell?

 Then we ran into a problem, the boys were outraged that there were more girls in the class and William was away so it was even more unfair.

We needed a solution:

Ashley said why don't four more boys just have a go. The boys agreed and chose the four boys who had made the longest jumps. They chose Jacob who got a massive jump more than three metres- more of a roll than a jump.

Then the girls decided that wasn't fair because the boys would probably get big jumps again.

We had to work out a fair way to pick. Jacob thought that Mrs Walker could pick but some boys thought it wouldn't work because she was also a girl.

Mrs Walker told the children about picking randomly and we selected four boys at random.
Jacob was one of them, and on the second go all of the boys improved their jumps by a lot. The girls were worried.

Each thinking partner pair got a calculator and added up both the boys and girls totals. They were very careful and systematic, everyone did it three times and were surprised at how easily you could get the wrong result.

The pairs worked out some excellent ways to record each total and we were all happy that we had the correct totals as most groups ended up with the same totals for most of their calculations.

In the end the boys had the largest total. Then Mrs Walker demonstrated how to work out the average. We divided the totals by the number of girls and then the boys total by the number of throws the boys had. Guess what, the girls had the greater average.

Two winning teams, thanks to maths.