Sprouting Kumara

 Just before the school holidays, Mrs McLellan showed us how to sprout kumara in our online meeting. 

1. Poke 4 toothpicks into the side of a kumara and balance it in a jar or container. 

2. Add water to the jar so that the bottom of the kumara is covered with water. 

3. Place the jar in a sunny spot for a few weeks and wait for the roots and leaves to grow.

Just before we could come back to school in our bubbles, Mrs McLellan carefully pulled off the shoots (with their roots)  and put them in another jar to bring to school. Here's a video of her explaining how.

In the afternoon of Bubble 7's first day back at school, we went to our school garden to plant the kumara shoots. First we had to clear away lots of weeds and overgrown vegetables. We left some parsley, curly kale and a cabbage growing. We harvested a handful of tiny potatoes and a spring onion (which we gave to the two gardening group students in the senior block). 

   

 

  

On a sunny afternoon, it was hard, hot work with our masks on! We filled up the compost bin, and worked together to drag the rest of the weeds to top up Dave's compost bin by the pool too. We were visited by a chirpy piwakawaka and were surprised by a spider, as we disturbed its resting place. We'll try to identify it in our bubble class this coming week.

 

When the garden was cleared, we worked in pairs to plant the kumara shoots. We put the roots in a hole, laid the shoot sideways towards the east (where the sun rises) and covered part of the stems. This is supposed to help the plant make more roots and grow more kumara. Then we watered our plants and headed back to the classroom for a well-deserved rest! Our bodies were certainly feeling the effort and satisfaction that goes into providing healthy food. 

  

Blog Ponder: World Car Free Day

 

Today is World Car Free Day. It is a day set aside to highlight the environmental pollution made by cars and encourage people to consider (and try) other options for transport like walking, bus, train, cycling, scootering, and so on.  As well as environmental benefits, the day can encourage our physical wellbeing (for example, getting exercise) and give us experiences of other ways of travelling around our communities. You can learn more about the way this day started and is celebrated here.

While we have been in Alert Level 4, many of us have not used our cars as much - or at all! The requirement to stay local has meant more people have gone for a walk or bike ride, or only used their car for short trips. At the end of the first Level 4 lockdown in 2020, a science project to monitor carbon emissions (one type of pollution from cars) studied grass clippings collected by volunteers at regular times over 12 weeks. The results showed that, in some places, the emissions were 80% lower in Level 4 than in Level 1!

Today, think about the way a car is used in your family in ordinary life (when we can travel freely at other alert levels). Below are three examples of opinions about this topic. Can you think of habits or ways you could change easily to rely less on cars? Do you think World Car Free Day is an effective idea?

Example 1: "My mum drives me to school. Then she drives my big brother to his school. We need a car."

Example 2: "I can use my scooter to get to school every morning. It will take me the same amount of time since we won't get stuck in traffic."

Example 3: "We live 4 kilometres away. There's no way I could walk or cycle to school."

In the comments below, add your ideas or respectfully respond to one of these situations, saying whether or not you agree and why. 

Matariki acrostic Poems

 Kia Ora Bloggers,

We have been focusing on Matariki for the last couple of weeks. This has meant that we have read lots about this special celebration. Last week, we also had a special Matariki day where we joined our buddy classes for different activities.

This week, we have been working on sharing our new knowledge in acrostic poems. To start, we shared what we already know and then used these to craft sentences using the letters of the word Matariki.  Have a read of our creations below.

We would love some of your positive, thoughtful and helpful feedback. 

Philippa Werry - a special guest for the middle syndicate

 Talofa Lava Bloggers,

This week we were very lucky to have the New Zealand author Philippa Werry visit our syndicate via video call.  She has written lots of books, including picture books, novels and some of the readers we use at school including stories in the school journal. She was really interesting and humorous, giving us lots of great advice and information.  One interesting fact was that her first story was published in the newspaper when she was 6 years old. It was still saved and glued into a scrapbook that she showed us, very precious!  

One important message that she shared with us was how important it is to edit our writing. Taking the time to do this before you publish is really important! We got to ask lots of questions to find out about her job and some of the connections that she has to other New Zealand authors.

Finally, she read us the start of one of her stories. It is called, "The best skateboarder in school" and you can find it in School Journal Part 1 Number 3 2003. We really enjoyed this and we are looking forward to exploring more of her stories. A special thank you to Mr Hing-Windsor for organising this for us. 

Have you had a visit from a school author? Do you have a question or comment? We'd love some feedback below.

Tofa soifua

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.

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?

Week 9 - Exercise and Sport Blog Ponder

 This week, some of our classes are focusing on sport, fitness and exercise for our T-shaped literacy.  We will be reading stories are about these topics. We will use the ideas we read about to help us with our descriptive writing.  We would love to get some of your ideas and thoughts about exercise because this will help us out too.  Could you respond to our blog ponder by adding your positive, thoughtful and helpful ideas in the comment section below? We would really appreciate it.

Thanks for reading, blog you later!