From Grotty to Great: how we made an art gallery in our cloak bay.

That title sounds a bit like a novel title to me, but it's not! It's a great description of the way we worked really hard to take our cloak bay from grotty to Great!!

Here are some examples of the finished art works.  See the reports on our personal blogs to see how the process worked to create these. 😎

Fractions in every day life.

Did you know that fractions surround us in everything we do?

In class today we hunted about to find some, and they weren't hard to find at all! First, Mr Gunn had us get together a group of ten random objects. Then, he had us think about some attributes that could be used to describe the objects in our group of stuff. After that Mr Gunn made us sort the objects into smaller groups using the attributes and finally we had to describe each small group as a fraction. Phew!

On our individual blogs you can see the pictures of our results.

Crafting Writing for an Audience

WALT: craft our writing to suit an audience.

Do you know the difference between writing for formal occasions and causally chucking down a few lines of text for the fun of it? Which has more rules?
More on this in a minute...

Today in the Tui class, we have been looking at ways to share a little bit of who we are using our blogs. Mr Gunn asked us if we knew the difference between formal and informal. We weren't sure so we compared some photos and tried to see if we could work it out for ourselves. Here are two of the pics:

Which one do you think is formal and which one is casual?

We decided that the one on the left is the formal one and the other casual. Do you agree?

Mr Gunn told us that a blog post about our life is more like the cool dude on the right and our explanation or instructional writing is more formal like the sharply dressed man on the left.

Both are cool and each have a particular time and place.

Audiences are bit like the people at the places where these guys are.

The people at the fancy party where that tuxedo man is would expect him to behave very sensibly and follow the etiquette of that place.

At the beach where the other dude is headed, there are way less rules about what you can do or wear.

Our blog posts this week reflect the more casual relaxed type of writing that enables us to share our opinions about things we like in our lives.

You can have a look at our posts by clicking through to our individual blogs using links on the left.

Gardening Galore (from seed to sprouting)

You may remember how last term we grew  a variety of plants from seed. This week, with the expert support of Corban's Nana and Mum, we planted these and some edible plants in our school garden. Nana Maureen taught us how to prepare the soil by leveling and loosening it. We then planned out where each of the plants would go by laying them on top of the soil. Maureen taught us about complimentary planting like tomatoes and basil, and marigolds to deter pests. We all took turns digging a small hole for a plant and 'heeling' it in to the soil. We have set up a team to water the plants three times a day, being careful no to pour the water on directly. Below are the photos of last terms efforts followed by today's awesomeness. 

Fishing With Dad, Green screen Holiday recount

 Green screen Holiday recount

Spaghetti and Marshmallow towers

Did you know that some shapes are much stronger than others in a building?

The clever builders who made the pyramids knew this and maybe that's why the pyramids are still standing.

In our class this week I set the clever Kea learners the challenge of building a structure using two non-traditional building materials. The aim was to build either the highest, or strongest structure using only uncooked spaghetti sticks and mini marshmallows. Mr Buckingham acted as our judge and the teams used a 200g vitamin container as a strength tester.

I also had a go at making a tower with some success.

We all did some shared research into which shapes would be strongest and we found that putting lots of triangles into our buildings made them stronger. Here are some pictures of our buildings starting with Mr Gunn's.

Rata's Waka (or how we need to look after the environment)

On Friday of last week,  we heard the story of Rata and the Waka. In the story Rata takes a Totara nui to make a Waka. But he didn't pay his respects to the environment so things didn't go his way until he did.

We did some thinking about how we are like Rata today in our society, and then we created a poster in response our ideas. Here are some of the children's slides.
Each child has more on their personal blog.