A couple of weeks ago the Middle and Junior Room students were with Miss Ward and we did some art. We were drawing Kiwis for our art since our inquiry topic is Kiwiana. Miss Ward said to make them big like a watermelon and not small like the size of a normal human hand because we wanted them to stand out. After we did the body and coloured it in, we had to draw some stars to make it look like night time. Then we would go to the dying table and dye the background black for the night time. Check out our Kiwi drawings down below!!!
Today we were lucky enough to have a visit from Gary from the South Otago Museum. We learnt about the early days of Waiwera South, the founding families and how we could research our own families/family trees. This was great as it related to our inquiry topic ‘What Can I Tell You About Me’ as the children were able to find out more about the place that they live and get an understanding of what sort of information they might want to find out about their own families.
At the beginning of the year Miss Taylor, Miss Holden and myself signed our classes up for a "Get NZ Writing' initiative by School Kit NZ. A couple of weeks ago we received a package from Room 10 at Cornwell Park District School in Auckland. It was very exciting to check what was inside. There were 32 postcards that had metaphors describing all the children in Room 10 and a ‘Found Poetry’ Poster that described their class and where they lived. They also sent us 'something random' which was a snake that moves randomly! It is very cool and it is our new favourite thing! We have spent the last few weeks preparing our postcards and classroom identity poster in preparation to send away to Cornell Park District School.
We all wrote two metaphors about ourselves on the postcards. Everyone has put a lot of effort into them and have done such a fantastic job.
We have packaged them all up and hope Room 10 enjoy what we have done!
Working together to put the puzzle together.
Carefully working on our postcards.
Making sure they are neat!
Our finished postcards put together.
Esther and Bree designed our class map.
Taylor found a poem inside a poem.
Three most important things to our class are our technology, our school values and our artwork.
Bree is very proud of our poster!
Doesn't it look great!
The snake we got from Room 10 at Cornwell Park District School.
Snake vs Lizard writing Today we watched a video called Iguana vs Snakes - Planet Earth II. We then had to write about how we felt and what we would be thinking if we were the iguana or the snake. It was a lot of fun writing about the suspense of the chase and for most of us, the relief! Check out the video and our writing below to see what you think!
Snake- Taylor
I'm hungry sneaking around looking. I smell something. I turn, I twist. What am I?
I am a snake looking for a smell. I sneak around. Something moves, I start chasing it. It's a iguana! My gang come along to help. We are all hungry and we want to eat today. We try our hardest but so does the iguana. We finally caught it! We try strangle it but it slips away. After it we go trying to chase it. The iguana takes a jump for its life and makes it! He climbs up and reaches the top while we are still stuck here. We slither away sadly and starving trying to look for another prey.
Unlucky Iguana- Courtney
One sandy morning I, the snake, have just spotted a very FAT Iguana. I feel like I should catch him because he would be able to feed the entire colony of snakes. I am a Sea Snake and I am very fast, fit and determined to catch that Iguana. So I slither over and I see the Iguana has frozen with fear because he saw me coming towards him. As soon as I twitched his tail he was on the run and I was after him like a cheetah chasing a water buffalo. Then suddenly…. My colony wrapped around his legs, body and neck….. But just then he managed to squeeze out and started to run again up the cliffs. Now I was Angry and really wanted him for lunch so I chased him up the cliff. He started jumping over gaps. One of my friends fell down the crack but I swerved and almost got him when…… I slipped down a giant gap in the mountain and fell down. But luckily I wasn’t dead and even though the Iguana got away, in the gap was full of dead meat piled on top of each other so I called my colony and we lived in the cave for the rest of our lives and never ran out of meat.
The Lucky Iguana- Esther
I was sitting on the sandy land of Africa when suddenly a snake slithers up to me. I stay as still as I possibly can hoping it will go away. It starts to go away. OH NO, I move! The snake slithers back, it comes up to me. I run like lightning for my life. Now all the other snakes are chasing me then suddenly one of the snakes catches me by the neck, then another hops on top of it. But I squeeze my way out and I manage to get to the rocks. I jump and the snake falls down the hole. Yes, I am safe! I am so relieved! I was so worried when I was being chased by the snakes. Now I am here with my mates and I can relax.
Snake and Lizard- Bree
Hi, this is lizard here. I am sitting in the snake area but I can hear a slithering noise coming from behind me. Suddenly I could see a snake coming up at me out of the corner of my eye. Omg! I start running and the snake is chasing me. His friends keep on appearing out of nowhere but I am running my fastest and I am ahead of them. To be honest they are really slow and skinny so I slow down. But what I couldn’t see were the snakes ahead of me and they bury me! So I wiggle and wiggle and wiggle around. Finally, I get away! I jump up and I am safe and sound back with my family. I am really lucky! Since they are skinny they might die because they have not had food in a long time.
Lizard- Emily
I was out sunbathing when a snake was slithering toward me! I faked that I couldn't see him then all of a sudden he was right behind me! As soon as he touched me I sprinted away. I was running like the wind and then there were millions of snakes trying to get me. Now I was freaked OUT! Next, I was getting strangled by about 3 snakes but somehow I managed to escape from them! I was running so fast on the rocks and snakes were everywhere. I was scared I would die.
Snakes and Lizards- Tristan
Snakes are predators to lizards. They fight when they get too close to them. The lizards feel fear when they are near. The snakes feel anger towards the lizards. The snakes have to slide around because they have no legs.
Lizard- Kordelia-Rose
I was on the bumpy rocks resting until I spotted a snake chasing after me. When I saw the snake I was feeling worried and afraid. The snakes starting chasing after me so I zoomed away from them but they just kept getting closer and closer. I ran faster and faster but then the snakes caught me and wrapped me up. I started to wriggle my way out of the snakes and then I finally made it out! I tripped over but I got back up and zoomed away like a cheetah. Oh no! The snakes have got me one more time but luckily I managed to get out again and finally I got home to my lizard family. I was so relieved.
Over the last two weeks we have started Morning Programme. This is to help us improve our listening and speaking skills through a variety of interesting tasks. Some of the topics so far have included My favourite, Show and Tell and teaching the class How to do something. We have had a range of different topics that have been shared. Flynn showed us how to put together a handpiece one week and brought along his favourite dog Tank the next. Tristan shared his favourite book, Esther made a rain gauge that turned into a marble run, Emily taught us a magic trick and so much more was shared. Bree even made a delicious pavlova for everyone to enjoy! We love doing Morning Programme! Morning Programme on PhotoPeach
Today the whole school was involved in setting up the traps for our Mothnet project. We finally received the traps for this a week ago. It has been a long time since the camp in November last year, but Miss Taylor and Alex were able to talk about the process and the purpose for doing this experiment.
We organised six mixed groups and each group had a trap to assemble using the equipment provided. The students worked in groups and used excellent problem solving skills to make sure their traps were set up properly and that the electronics were all working.
Once they were all set up we went about placing the traps in our three different sites. Two traps went up Hillbilly (reference site) two by the garden (control site) and two down by the Waiwera Hall (treatment site). All groups checked their lights were working and set up their tracking tunnels to track what pests are in the area and whether that affects the amount of moths in that specific area.
Tomorrow morning we will collect the moths in and reset the traps for Tuesday night. Then we will discuss the results and come up with some conclusions.
There were lots of excited students and excitement levels will be high when we go to check the traps too!
At the start of the term we did some writing about our holidays. We chose two main things we wanted to tell each other about. To go with our writing we decided to do some self portraits. We had to make sure we used up all the space on the paper and it was in the middle of our page. We used pastels or coloured pencils to finish our beautiful artworks and made them colourful. Finally we had to stick on some giant sunglasses that had pictures of the two activities we had written about. They are now up on our wall beside our writing so come and check them out.
Yesterday we had another visit from Greer the Sports Activator. This time we were learning some soccer skills. We began by playing a warm-up game of ‘Donkey Tails’. This was where we had bibs tucked into our shorts as a tail. The aim of the game was to steal each others tails. The person with the most tails at the end of the game was the winner. Next up was a game of “Shark Attack’. Everyone had a ball and we had to dribble it around in the marked our area. There were two people in and they had to try kick as many balls out as they could. This was one of our favourite games. Finally, we played a game similar to ten pin bowling, except we had to kick soccers balls and knock the balls off the cones. It was quite tricky but we all had such a fun time racing each other to be first!
