Scientists Day

Today was a very exciting day for us because we got to be Scientists for an hour!

We had about eight scientists come in to work with our school today. We looked at the leaf litter from Ngawakahiamoe. Heather brought in samples from 2 different areas – one from a wet area that was lower and one from the bank which was higher and bit drier.

We were able to collect some of the leaf litter and put it into a petri dish. We then got to look at it under microscopes.

We got taught to use the microscopes you have to put your hands on the dials on the side to move the magnifying glass up and down, there were also little dials on eye parts that you could turn to enhance the view.

Some of things we found were: bugs, such as: snails, centipedes, millipedes, spiders, sand hoppers, land hoppers, ladybugs (both blue and red), ants, flies, bugs that light up and worms, mushrooms, sticks, leaves, soil and kahikatea berries.

Some of us, who were really interested in the science are able to go back after lunch and have another look.

      

Ngāwakahiamoe

Ngāwakahiamoe is a swap bush reserve behind our school, which is named for – Where the waka sleeps.

On Thursday, our entire school (except Layla – who has a broken leg) walked the 2.5 kilometres from our school to Ngāwakahiamoe, which is found out behind us. We are the Kaitiaki of this area, so it is nice to go out there and explore the land out there and learn how we can help look after it.

Some students in our class, Kaliah-Rose and Ngarongo, as well as other students in the school, have helped plant trees out Ngāwakahiamoe as their iwi is closely connected to this place.

Some of our favourite things to do were: play amongst the roots, swinging on vines, exploring the forest, finding bones from a cow, finding lots of little (edible) berry seeds and learning more about the environment. It was also really cool to find some silver ferns!

On Tuesday, we have some scientists coming in to help us explore the leaf litter we found on the ground out there, as there are many tiny snail species out at Ngāwakahiamoe.

        

Sustainable Coastlines

Last week, our entire school took the bus (or van) down to Waitārere Beach.

Olivia and Nate from Sustainable Coastlines came in first thing in the morning, and spoke to our whole school about what we were doing and why we were doing it.

We were then broken up into 2 groups – years 5-8 and years 1-4. The year 5’s went first and waited for everyone else down at the beach

When everyone got to the beach, most of us were able to put hi-vis vests (there wasn’t enough for everyone to have one) as well as a pair of gloves because we were going to be picking up rubbish!

The year 5-8’s then hammered pegs into the ground about 50 metres apart and then walked along as a huge group picking up any rubbish that we saw.

The year 1-4’s were on a different part of the beach, we were in smaller groups walking amongst our boundary looking for rubbish.

The year 1-4’s also got to build sandcastles, while some of the year 5-8’s did a running race along the beach.

The coolest thing that was found was a MASSIVE pumice rock, that was way bigger than all of our heads!

When we got back to school, we put all the rubbish we had found on a tarpaulin – there was over 300

pieces of rubbish!

What we learnt about this is that we should always take our rubbish home with us when we leave somewhere as the environment is just as important as us!

Alien Monsters!

Kia ora!

A few weeks ago, Miss Salton taught us how to use Google Draw to create a creature. We could use any shapes we wanted using the shapes and line tool. We coloured are shapes using the fill bucket, and some of us even learnt how to create a gradient effect for our creature.

Most people also made a background for their monster or alien.

We used our creative skills (one of our values!) to help us come up with a creature. We learnt about the different tools that Google Draw can give us. We also learnt how to search for pictures for our backgrounds.

Check out our slide deck below!

POUTAMA 2023

Kia Ora, Hello, Ni Hao, Bonjour, Kia Orana, Dia dhuit, Ciao!


We are Poutama 2023! We have 21 students; 14 of us are girls and we have 7 boys! Our teacher is Miss Salton.

This year, we are doing some tech lessons with Miss Salton and the Year 6’s from Tuakana, while the Year 7 and 8’s go to Manawatu College for their tech lessons. We have started with art by making mosaic tiles and clay sculptures. We will also be doing collage art. Throughout the year, our tech lessons are going to cover: music, dance and drama, cooking, science, design and digital! We are excited to learn these new skills!

In literacy this year, we are doing Structured Literacy for our spelling; our writing this term is narratives – where we get to make up our own stories! Our reading is all different depending on our groups.

In maths, this term we are learning addition, subtraction, place value and we will get to multiplication as well!

We love going outside and having PE or swimming sessions! We have our swimming sports in term 1, which some of us are looking forward to (some of us aren’t though!)

We are a PB4L school and use our 4 C’s to make sure we are following the rules. These 4 C’s are: Communication, Collaboration, Consideration and Creativity! At the end of each week, we might be lucky enough to have our name pulled out of the draw, at assembly and win a prize!

In our class, we are allowed to eat throughout the day, whenever we are hungry; however, our snacks have to be healthy in the morning. We also have weetbix, fruit and muesli bars in class that we can eat whenever we need to.

We will be updating our class blog, and our own blogs every week, so we look forward to hearing from you! Please ask us any questions you would like to know about our awesome little school – Poroutawhao, or our class – Poutama!

Poutama Class Trip

On Thursday 1st December, our class went on a trip to Palmerston North.

We went to the lido, the esplanade and cloud 9.

At the lido, we were able to go on the hydroslides. Everyone really liked the superbowl. In the superbowl, you have to be in a floatie and you spin around and around until you come out the other end! There was also a speed slide, which was super fast! Less than half the class gave this one a go, because it was so scary! Lots of people did the inside slides.

We also were able to use the diving boards and lots of people built their confidence up by jumping off the highest board!

At the lido, we also had the aquarun, the outside play area – aquafun as well as the inside and outside pools!
We had so much fun!

After the lido, we walked to the esplanade and had some lunch and a play in the park. People were on the seesaw, the slides, the hamster wheels, the flying fox and talking to each other with the special science things!

Once we had played for a little bit, we got back on the bus and went to cloud 9!

Cloud 9 is a trampoline park, we had to watch the safety video and then once we had special grip socks we were able to go and jump! Cloud 9 has foam pits, spinning things, dodgeball, basketball, zorbs and so many trampolines!

We were especially lucky because Miss Salton also bought us slushies!

After an hour of jumping, it was time to come back to school!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks to the parents who came with us!

Exploring Blogs

Today we learned about the different parts of a blog. We also talked again about the reasons for blogging. We learned that not every blog post has to be a display of published work – sometimes we can share a draft or work in progress on our blog to get feedback from other people about what we might try next. Another reason to blog is to teach other people something that we know how to do really well.

Based on this learning, we brainstormed a list of things that we might like to post about. Now we will begin crafting our very first posts for our individual learner blogs. Here’s our list of ideas; we’d love to hear your suggestions so we can have more ideas.

 

Logging in to our individual learner blogs

Today we finally got to use our own individual learner blogs. The first thing we had to learn to do was log in. From our class blog we found the link to our own blog and then logged in with Google. It’s great using all Google products because it makes the login process easy.

A blog post has a title and a body. We drafted the body of our post first to make sure that we were writing a quality blog post. Once our draft had been checked by a teacher, we copied and pasted the text into the Edublog.

The last thing we had to do was learn how to add a picture. Pressing the Add Media button took us to a screen where we could upload our visual blog profiles. Some of us created an avatar instead of using an actual photo of ourselves. We could format this picture if we wanted to – to change the size or the orientation of the photo in our post. 

We used the Preview button to check we were happy with everything and then it was finally time to press Publish. You can connect with our individual blogs by clicking on the widget on the right-hand side of this blog. Our first entries will be our personal profiles. Please have a look and leave a comment.

 

Personal Blog Profiles

Today we put into practice all of the things we learned last term about leaving a positive digital footprint. We remembered what we’d learned about what can be shared publicly and what’s better kept private, then we created our personal blog profiles. 

These are some of the reasons to blog:
-to share our learning with the world;
-to connect with an authentic audience for our learning outcomes; 
-to engage in interactions and decision-making with our peers, whānau and a wider audience.

Now that our personal blog profiles are ready, we will start writing in our individual learner blogs. You can connect with our individual blogs by clicking on the widget on the right-hand side of this blog. Our first entries will be our personal profiles. Please have a look and leave a comment.

Private and Personal

We are learning to make smart decisions about what personal information we share online. We have learned that we musn’t share any personal information that would help people to find us in real life; examples of this sort of information are our address, our phone number, and our last name. 

To demonstrate our understanding of these ideas we arranged images of different examples of information on a table; we have to decide whether the information was private or public. Then we had to explain what we were thinking when we made each decision.

This is an important topic to learn about because we are getting ready to start posting on our own personal blogs next term.

Here is an example of a finished Google Drawing of this work.