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. 

  

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. 

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.

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?

Reading and Summarising - How we keep safe in water

 Last week, we read stories about being safe around water as our Reading theme.  Our challenge was to find the main ideas in the stories we read to see if we could learn new ideas about how we can be safe around water or what we should do to be safe around water.  

We analysed and summarised ideas with our reading groups.  To do this we read and talked about

• the good things the characters in our stories did. 
• the not so safe things that they did.
• what we thought about the actions of the characters in the story. 

To show our thinking, we had the chance to use our new digital skills to make a poster to show some different ways that we can be safe around water using our new understanding.  Have a look at some of our DLO (digital learning objects) below.

We would appreciate some positive, thoughtful and helpful feedback about what we have created. Thanks for reading!

Tuhi Mai Tuhi Atu - Introductions

 Kia Ora Bloggers, 

This term we have joined a new Tuhi Mai, Tuhi Atu blog group. This is where we connect to other classes who work digitally like us around the country. We make connections by commenting on class blogs and later individual blogs. We are looking forward to investigating these class blogs in class.  It is super exciting because it means we will have more people to comment on and share our learning and creations with.   It is important that we are positive, thoughtful and helpful when we work online.

 You will find the links to Kaiwhare and Mokoroa's buddy classes in a list on the right of the page. We will take turns commenting on each class blog.

As a start we have shared some google drawings of ourselves, some share what we like, others are developing skills so just show our names.  We had to be Cybersmart when we created these too.  There is one for Kaiwhare class and one for Mokoroa class.  Have a look at what we like and see if you have any connections to us.  If you do, please leave a comment,  we love comments and feedback!

 

Week 5 - Learning through Lockdown

 This week we have returned to Level 3 lockdown.  This means that we have been carrying on our learning at home. For many of us, this is the first time that we have had our Chromebooks at home with us and we have been using our class site to access lots of learning.

During the day, we come together at 1:30 for a class meeting.  It has been great to connect with each other from afar.  Here are some of the learning highlights from our class meetings.

Our big focus for the year is Taha Tinana (Physical Wellbeing).  On Monday, we all contributed to a class discussion by sharing our favourite sports.  Then, on Tuesday, we grouped our pictures together to make some statements about what we noticed from the data we gathered.  What do you notice?

On Monday we played a word game together.  Our challenge was to see how many words we could build using the letters in the word wellbeing. Mr Riceman challenged Kaiwhare class to come up with at least 10 words as a team.  A list of the words we made is below. Could you add any more?

• we
• well
• big
• will
• win
• being
• web
• in
• line
• wing
• I'll
• be
• new
• bell
• being

On Wednesday, we had been working on using interesting words in our writing.  We used the chat in google meet to share different verbs we could think of.  Mr Riceman then grouped all of the verbs and turned them into the running word cloud you can see below. Our challenge is to use these interesting words whenever we write.

What learning have you been doing while away from school?  We would love to hear your positive, thoughtful and helpful comments.

Out of the box day

 Kia Ora bloggers,

We are very excited to share our learning journey with you.  Today was the first day that we got to use our Chromebooks this year. For many of us, this was a chance to open our Chromebooks for the first time during our 'Out of the Box' event.  The Chromebooks are very exciting tools for our learning.  We had a big discussion about how to look after them and we will be working more on the Kawa of Care at school. Here are some of the ideas from our discussion:

Below are a few photos that show how excited we were as we opened up our Chromebooks:

Finally, we spent some time exploring our new class sites. This is where our learning is posted.  You can check them out too.  Here is a link to Kaiwhare and Mokoroa's shared site and Haumia's class site. 

We are looking forward to sharing more of the Learning, Creating and Sharing that we do with you.  Please check back regularly to see what we have been doing.