Yesterday on Wednesday 14 June our class travelled with Room 6 to a place called Te Maire Lagoon in Shannon to help plant trees. We were invited by Horizons Regional Council. We had to take a bus because it was too far to drive.
Before we started we had a karakia led by Matua Robert Ketu and Pa Wylie. We helped plant 1,800 trees in just under two hours. Afterwards we were starving! We had kai and water given to us by Ngāti Whakatere. We all enjoyed our day. Written by Poutama.
Last week we started Cooking Technology in Poutama and the year 6 students from Tuakana. We started with a ‘no bake slice’. We had to pick a slice that the whole class could eat, including Lilly who has an anaphylaxis allergy to eggs and nuts. We decided on lolly cake. We split up into 4 groups with a year 6 leader in each group. We were all assigned a task in our group. We used maths concepts that we are learning about during our maths breakout groups (fractions, and capacity). Unfortunatly our school technology room is out of action due to a flooding disaster (a rat ate through our dishwasher waste pipe!) so we had to find room in our staffroom and outside to work.
We liked the process of making our slice, but loved eating the final product more! This week on Friday we are making and baking bread!
Today, Craig and Greg from Otago University and Otago Museum came to visit us to teach us about the Science of Medicines. Each class took turns visiting them to find out more.
Vani got to add in liquid into a test tube, 3 different times, which changed the colour in there to show how antibiotics work.
Liam, Jonty and Zephy got to drop different types of pills into liquid to see how fast the reaction time was.
Layla, Kaliah-Rose, Emma and Sinead got to throw ‘covid’ at dolls to see if they would fall, and the whole class played covid ker-plunk.
After that we all got to look around at the different things that they had brought. We got to look at things under the microscopes, and used a computer and iPads to look around at images of illnesses as well as play different games.
There was also a 3D model of the covid bug.
We learnt lots!
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 is a swamp 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.
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!
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!
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.
For the last two Cybersmart sessions we have been learning that we can find information about people from what is shared on their blog. We looked at two different personal blogs and searched for personal information about the people (dogs!) who wrote the blogs. By being clever detectives we learned about the difference between private and public information. We worked out that you can guess where to find someone from information shared in their pictures, as well as who their siblings might be from knowing their last name.
All this information is important for us to learn because we have started writing in our class blog. We need to be Cybersmart when we share information online.
Here is an example of the information we found out from looking at the dog blogs.
We have been learning about how to look after our chromebooks – the Kawa of Care. This is an important topic because our chromebooks are expensive and we want them to be useful for many years. To demonstrate our understanding of the Kawa of Care we created some comic strips using Google Draw.
This is our first time using Google Draw so we had to learn how to search for images on the internet using the Explore tool, and how to crop and resize our images. In Google Draw we learned how to insert a callout shape and how to use the align tool to center our text inside the callouts.
Here is a slidedeck of our comics. We hope you like them.