Middle School Zoofari Trip

 Talofa lava bloggers,

On Monday the 24th of Monday, the middle syndicate was lucky enough to visit the Auckland Zoo to participate in the Zoofari experience.  The first exciting highlight of the day was a trip to the Zoo on a double decker bus!

When we arrived, we were greeted by Lizzy who gave us lots of information during our briefing and set us up for our class guided tours along the African Safari track.  Our Zoo educators were amazing, they had lots of interesting things to share with us and things that we could feel while we were learning.  

Then, under the guidance of our awesome parent helpers, we explored the zoo, ticking off the different animals that we visited on our map.  It was really interesting to have the chance to find the animals that we like and have a look at their habitats and how they can be adapted to them.

The final main event for the day was a second educator session. During this time we watched a feeding session for the spider monkeys. We also found out that we can do our bit for conservation by making sure that we buy paper with this special logo so that spider monkey habitats are kept safe.

Have you been to the Zoo before? Do you do something to protect animals?  We would love to hear what you do in our comment section below.

Pink Shirt Day

This week, we have been looking at our responsibilities in helping to prevent bullying. 

We did an activity where we used a picture of ourselves, made some comments to it that weren't kind, then screwed it up. Later we apologised to the screwed up paper, opened it up and tried to make it flat again. This activity was to show that, even when we apologise, what we have said can still affect someone. 

We made some chatterboxes with positive comments to share with others or encouraging comments to help us when we need them.

We have thought of ways we can encourage others with compliments. Here are some of our ideas:

• I like how you include others
• I like how you are helpful
• I like how you make people happy
• I like how you play fair
• I like how are a good friend
• I like how you can run so fast

(Maybe you could choose one of these to share with someone you know).

And we also designed our own t-shirts to help promote being bully free.

To finish our week we participated in the Pink Shirt Day to raise awareness that it is not okay to bully others. It's our responsibility to make sure we are kind to others. 

The whole school on Pink Shirt Day

Haumia on Pink Shirt Day

What are some ways you can show kindness towards others and what are some things you could do if you see someone being bullied? Maybe you could answer these questions in the comments below.

Oat the Goat thinking hats

 Kia Ora Bloggers,

This week is Bully Free NZ week and we are going to be reading more about this and doing some activities in our class.  This morning, we watched a story called Oat the Goat.  It was story that was about being nice to people and it had an important message about not bullying people. 

We were asked to do a thinking hat activity.  We got some ideas from the story and matched them to the different hats so we could think about our story in different ways.  This helps our understanding. Here are the ideas that we shared as a class.

Have a read of our ideas and have a look at the story yourself.  We would love some comments!

Cameron Pools Swimming

 Kia Ora, 

Welcome back to Term Two. It has been a busy first week back for us.  We are very lucky to have started our 10 swimming sessions at Cameron Pools.  We will be learning about water safety, survival and other swimming techniques.  These lessons are part of the GAAP programme. It is great to have our swimming teachers in the pool with us to help our learning.

Lessons started on Tuesday and they will be on every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon for the first 5 weeks of this term. We need to make sure that our togs, towel and other swimming gear is ready for each important session. 

Do you have swimming lessons? Are they through your school or personal ones after school?  We'd love your feedback with a positive, thoughtful and helpful blog post.

Art - Sporty Portraits Using Digital Tools in Te Ana Ako

In Term 1, our art was inspired by our Inquiry learning about Taha Tinana (Our Physical Wellbeing).  Throughout the term we were learning about different ways our bodies can move and so we developed some Sporty Portraits to show the different sports we enjoy and the ways our bodies can move.  

Unlike our self-portraits (which we did individually), we needed each other to get the best images for our artworks. We started out by acting out a sport or activity we like.  We talked about how to exaggerate (make bigger or extend) our movements so it was clear what type of sport we were playing.  We also thought about the lines our arms and legs were making away from our bodies, so our audience could see our direction of travel.  We wanted to make silhouette pictures, so our actions needed to be clear to communicate our movement. Here's an example from Google images that shows someone jumping: 

Image credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IMG_6616-william-roberts_Noosa-Australia-2018_girl-jumping-silhouette_beach_sunset_3024x4032.jpg

Then we worked with a buddy to take a photo of each other with our Chromebook camera.  It was pretty tricky to get a picture with our whole body in it and not distorted by the angle of the Chromebook screen.  We also had a hard time moving our whole body, rather than just an arm to throw or leg to kick. We looked like stick people not sportspeople! We needed to rethink our tools so our project could continue more successfully.

Our next attempt at getting pictures was heaps of fun. Mr Hing-Windsor gathered a bunch of sports equipment and we worked with a buddy or small group to play with the equipment outside for a short time. Then we would swap equipment with another group and try that out.  The teachers whizzed around to take photos on their phones of each person in action.  There were plenty of duds in that set of photos too, but everyone was captured in a great pose at some point.  Everyone got plenty of exercise that afternoon.

For our following art session, we were given a print out of our photo. We each carefully cut out our body. Sometimes it was hard to see where to cut on a black and white copy, so a few of us got another copy so we weren't missing an elbow or foot.  It was helpful to roughly cut around and then go more slowly to use our scissors more accurately.  We remembered the advice from Miss McGrath to cut using the part of the scissors where the blades join, rather than the blade tips.  It was a lot easier to move the paper and hold the scissors steady than tie ourself in knots as we moved the scissors around our picture! 

We glued the cut-out of our body to thick black paper and then cut it out again.  Not everyone finished this step and our buddy could help if we were having trouble, so it was cool for the teachers to see lots of cooperation at this stage too. Mrs McLellan finished cutting some bodies out for people. She discovered that fingers and hair go in lots of directions when we play sport!

Image Source: https://menloparkart.wordpress.com/art-smart-links/

As we neared the end of the term we were pressed for time to complete our backgrounds.  The teachers decided to use digital tools to give us time to experiment without having to wait for paint to dry or space for another turn.  This helped speed up the process and most of us could choose our favourite background to use.  We learned about the colour wheel and how colours on opposite sides of the wheel are called complementary colours.  They can stand out from each other really clearly so they are useful when we are using colours in other work too, like making an infographic about our learning in reading or publishing our writing.  Here is a link to the activity we did, allowing us to choose different digital tools to make a background. 

When our backgrounds were printed out in colour we could glue our silhouette onto the space.  We needed to think about how our body was interacting with the sports equipment.  Our next task was to draw our sports equipment on some scraps of the thick black paper.  To give our final artwork more impact, we exaggerated the size and shape of the equipment so it looked like it was coming out towards the viewer.  This is a way of playing with perspective.  

Finally our work was mounted on a plain background by the teachers.  They had intended to display all the silhouettes from our group together but they were so amazing and unique that almost all could be mounted individually.  Just the group using the long skipping rope couldn't be separated in a way that made sense!  

Here's a selection of our finished Sporty Portraits.  

  

Which sport would you try to show, if you could make your own Sporty Portrait?