Serious Artwork..

This term we have been doing some serious artwork and they have turned out great.
These are the steps we got told to do them in:
* get a piece of brown paper
* Then get some chalk
* After that we drew with the chalk a New Zealand native tree or plant
* Then we got 3 different shades of pastels and we blended them all together to make a cool picture
*After that we smudged it with our fingers
* Then we got some black dye and put all over the picture
* The 2nd to last step was to get some news paper and put the picture in side fold it in half and rub it with your hands 1 2 1 2 side ways
* The last and final step is to take the picture out and then leave it to dry on your desk or table
Hopefully then after you have followed these steps correctly your picture will come out with silver out lines. That is how we made these fantastic pictures.
C.R

THE BEST TRIP EVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We just had the best trip ever Guess Where
You got it Tiritiri Matangi. We took a People fery of to the Island.Then We went up Blue Bottle Trail it only took 1-2 hours. On the walk we saw LOADS of New Zealand Native Birds and Plants. At the top we had lunch during lunch I saw a Saddleback Wood Pigeon and lots more. After lunch we walked back on Kauri track.Kauri track took 2-3 hours to walk on. We are studying about Wild New Zealand. At the moment we are doing New Zeland Native bird Reports. The birds are Pukeko, Tui, Kea, Kakapo,Weka and many more.

NZ Robin

This is my report

The Pukeko Diary
Intro
The pukeko is a special New Zealand bird Pukekos are common all over New Zealand.

Habitat
This Magnificent creature cane live in Australia and New Zealand. The like in quite swampy areas. Also they are often seen by motoways and roads. They are not at all scared of Trucks, Cars, Airplanes and Trains that is why they often get hit.

Diet
The Pukekos diet is quite a lot they eat Snails, Insects, Eggs of ground birds, Fish, Leaves, Seeds, Frogs and as a treat they have Duckling. Pukekos catchtheir prey by standing very still for a minute they race foward and catch it. Their prey can't usually run away because Pukekos have long thin legs so they can run very fast.

Life Cycle
The Pukekos Hatch from a reddy creamish coloured egg. The Mother Pukeko lay between 4-8 eggs! When the chicks are born they are a dark black colour. The chicks are more awere of stoats than their mothers. After about 2-4 years they have fully grown. They become an adult Pukeko.
AGEB

The Hard Cross Country

It has been a very long term this term. We have just had Cross Country and been to interschools our school came a big 2ND over all. One of my friends ran in the 9 year old she came another big 3RD out of all the 9 year olds.At our school the 9 and 10 year olds had to do 3 LAPS of our WHOLE School.The year 1s where SO SO lucky they only had to do 1 Lap of our FIELD not our school our field.
AGEB

Collaboration

Hi everyone,
just sharing a VoiceThread project we collaborated on with Mr Kirkpatrick's class in Manchester to write cinquians about the pictures on Mr Kirkpatrick's VoiceThread. We didn't know what cinquains were when Mrs McGhie first showed the VoiceThread to us. She told us there were 3 different types, some were trickier then others. We decided it would be best if we followed the format used by Mr Kirkpatrick's class. It was really neat to be able to take part in a written language activity with a class across the other side of the world.

Beginnings and Endings

Hi Room 24

I thought you might like to try this out. Since we learnt about this last term I thought you might like to practise creating interesting beginnings and endings for stories. Leave a comment on our blog to tell me what you thought of the activity or to leave tips and suggestions for others.
From Mrs Mc

what we have been up to.

The last few weeks we have been in the Discovery Centre making ads about ourselves on Movie Maker,Power Point and Photo Story. Most of us chose Power Point. When we were finished the teacher showed the whole class everybodys ad. While we were watching, Mrs McGhie was assessing us. A few people didn't get to show theirs because they were not finished or they hadn't done somthing. A few weeks after we had assembly. 3 people were presenters, one each from Rm 24, Rm 22 and Rm 23. At the end of the assembly we did a rap about being in team five, that someone in our class made up. After assembly when everyone had left, we went back to our class and did oral presentations. We had interviewed a partner and we were presenting them in front of the whole class. Some people thought it was really embarrassing. While we were presenting our partner the teacher was assesing us on voice projection, eye contact and stuff like that. Meanwhile, we have finished the "Misery Guts" book we started to read. We had to do a last activity about it like a film strip or board game and heaps of other stuff. Nearly everyone did the board game. We have also been doing something called Nga Mihi wich is kind of like "Advertising Me" but slightly different. In the time we had with it we had to draw a picture of what you look like, we also had to copy our house and write where we live inside our drawn house, where you came from, what airline you flew here in,what river and also what mountain was near us in our country. We have also been learning about the sixteen Habits of Mind here are some of them:
Creating,Imagining and Innovation,
Taking responsibile risks,
Persisting,
Managing Impulsivity,
Remainig open to continuous learning
and Thinking flexibily.
Bye for now!!!!
By G.A.

Dancing at the Mall

Our class has been writing narratives based on television adverts that we think are effective and attention grabbing adverts. This is a narrative written by one of the talented Rm 24 authors.

Well just yesterday I was in the Westfield parking lot, parking my car. Just then as I turned off my car something really strange happened, my brand new silver car turned into a enormous transformer and started dancing to music. I was really scared at first but soon I realised he was totally harmless so I joined in.
Everyone from inside the mall stared at us but I just said "Join in." Not long after that we had everyone in the mall dancing with us. All of the shopkeepers wondered where all the customers had gone.
All of a sudden the transformer turned back into my car, but everyone kept dancing. Then I wondered why. Soon I realised I hadn't turned off the car radio so kept dancing.
Not long after the dancing we all went back into the mall for dinner. We all hoped a news reporter was there and guess what I'm now reading today's newspaper and it's on the front page with the headline,
"DANCING IN THE MALL PARKING LOT!!!"
Who knows when I'll have another dancing session.

By KW

The Week in Review

Hello Again,

This week we haven't been as busy as we originally were. We have been doing quite a bit of maths like measuring our group buddies and practising our basic facts. In Topic our subject is Advertising Me. We have been looking at adverts and writing naratives about the advert we chose. Some of the adverts we looked at were: The Playdoh bunnies, exploding paint and bouncing balls for Sony Bravia, cars on balloons for Ford and cars transforming into Transformers. We have also been learning the 16 Habits of Mind - our class made posters for each one. In Maths we learnt a new game, it had a really weird name. It was called the "No Name Game". It is supposed to help with adding compatible numbers to 100. Today we have our first assembly. In Written Language we have been learning about capitilisation. In the Computer Suite and in the school library we have been learning about the Dewey Decimal System. The system is:

000s- General Works
100s- Psychology and Philosophy
200s- Religion and Mythology
300s- Social Sciences
400s- Languages
500s- Natural Sciences
600s- Applied Science
700s- Fine Arts and Recreation
800s- Literature
900s- Geography and History

Keep checking out our blog for more new posts on what we have been doing
See you later

Room 24 and Mrs McGhie (Written by KW)

Fun And Education Galore!

We've been really busy again! A couple of weeks ago we went to art classes with Graham Braddock and we had to draw a possum. We had to draw it in a few easy steps:

First set the limits
Next draw the big shapes
Then draw the sub shapes.
Then draw the little shapes.
Then add the detail.

Here is a picture of our finished products -aren't they amazing?








Graham Braddock usually comes to our school every year in February, he's a pretty amazing artist.

Last week we spent 2 days participating in Team 5 Outdoor Education Activities. There were 4 different activities; Bush Craft, Orienteering, Problem Solving and Water Safety.

For Bush Craft we watched a video and found out what we needed to take on a bush walkor tramp. On the video it showed people who knew what they were doing and people who DIDN'T know what they were doing and didn't check any of the conditions. One group tested how fast the river was going and didn't cross it. The other group on the video didn't test and tried to cross so someone lost their bag. We learnt a lot about what to do and what not to do if we ever go to the bush ourselves.

We thought Orienteering was the best activity because it was like a treasure hunt, the clues were scattered all over the place. We didn't have to use compasses because they are a bit tricky to learn to use in a hurry. On the first day Mrs McGhie wrote the clues and they weren't too tough. The next day though, the people who had won the day before wrote our clues and they were really HARD!

For Problem Solving we had to imagine we were at the "Tricky Swamp" and we had to find a path through it on the grid Mrs Peters gave us. A boy from another class got through it first. It was quite hard to find our way through in the first place but, we finally got through. Mr Halkyard and Mrs Peters took turns at running this.

Water Safety meant you had to wear an over sized T-Shirt and you had to create a flotation device made from milk bottles, string and pipe. We worked in teams to make our flotation devices. It was lots of fun.

Our class is participating in the Voices of the World project with children from all over the world. We had to create some pictures to represent the numbers 1 - 10 and then use Photostory to create a movie with our voices counting to 10. We chose to count in Maori as New Zealand is the only place in the world that it comes from (although there is Cook Island Maori as a language but it's a little bit different. Our movie should be uploaded to the Voices of the World wiki site in a few days. In the meantime you can check it out here.




We are loving having a blog and are enjoying all your lovely comments. Mr Lietze's class wondered why we didn't have photos of our lovely smiling faces. We decided not to put pictures of ourselves on because we have been talking about cyber safety and being careful about our "digital footprints". However, we'd love to know what you think? Maybe some of you that have been blogging for a while might like to leave a comment sharing your opinions. We like to hear different points of view.

VoiceThread

Yesterday we contributed to a VoiceThread about Sir Edmund Hillary. Ms Hellyer at Tradale Intermediate created it and her class Rm 18, Mr Lietze's class (Year 6s from Tauranga) and our class have all shared our ideas about the attributes that made Sir Edmund Hillary special. We have also thought about how we could be like him and have set goals for ourselves based on these attributes. We drafted our ideas first, then recorded ourselves reading them outloud onto the VoiceThread . You can click the play button on the VoiceThread below to hear our contributions and see what children from other schools have added. Rm 18 are going to add theirs soon and some other schools might add things too so check back and see. Our recordings are attached to the cat picture (Mrs McGhie's cat Merlin)and are scattered all through the VoiceThread . We were really excited to be able to hear our voices and think it's pretty cool to be working on a shared project with these older children.