Yesterday we had a visit from John who taught us scooter skills. We learnt about the importance of wearing a helmet that fit properly. We also talked about some safety rules like stopping and walking across the road and making an emergency stop at a sneaky driveway. We had fun practising some of these things under our canopy. Check out our skills…

 

         

   

   

  

Talofa lava, as some of you may know last week was Kaupapa Moana – Sea Week. In light of this we began creating some art around this. It is still a work in progress but here are the steps we followed.

1. We got white pastel and drew a variety of different wavy lines onto it to create a sea effect – this was a little tricky as we were using white pastel on white paper!
2. The next step was using dye. We had three colours, blue, green and turquoise. We used one colour at a time on different parts of the paper, so in the end we had our entire piece of A3 paper covered in different colour dye.
3. After that we sprinkled rock salt on top of the paper to give it another layer of texture – when it landed on the dye it made little ripples around it.
4. We carefully carried our wet art onto our new drying rack (we were excited to use this for the first time).
5. Fast forward a week later, we then chose 1 of 5 sea animal silhouettes to stick onto black paper and cut out.
6. After that we glued it onto our piece of paper with pastel and dye that had been cut into a circle.

We used this art work as inspiration for a narrative piece of writing. The reason our art is cut into circles it because we started our narrative writing with the same sentence starter… “I was looking out the submarine window when I saw.” We are still thinking about how we are going to display this on our wall with our writing alongside it – feel free to comment any ideas.

What an awesome day we had for Family Fun Day this week!  Students moved around the school in their house groups to take part in a range of activities. We used our school pool and had set up a slip’n’slide down the hill. There was also a large inflatable water slide as part of our wet play activities. Students also used our adventure playground and an inflatable obstacle course. And lastly, we used wheels (bikes, scooters, skateboards etc) and had  games on our bike track and courts. We had a cake stall selling cakes, slices and biscuits, and a sausage sizzle for lunch. Many of our whanau joined us and helped out (thanks so much). Everyone was tired by the end of the day but we had such a fun time. Check out some of the photos below and feel free to make a comment or ask a question.

   

     

Over the past few weeks we have been learning about arguments or persuasion. Here is a sample of our persuasive writing about cats and dogs. Which do you prefer and why? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Last week  we had some visitors from the Corban Estate Art Centre take us for an art session.

 

We learned how to make paint using clay, honey and water.

         

 

We used the paint to create patterns on different coloured paper.

           

 

Then we folded, cut or scrunched up the paper to create features of a landscape (volcano, hills, rivers etc) and glued it to a cardboard base.

     

 

Everybody learned a lot and had fun along the way.

       

     

What do you think of our art? Let us know in the comments.

 

We have been celebrating Cook Island Language Week at school this week. In reading we looked at some texts with links to the Cook Islands (‘A Quilt for Kiri’ and ‘A Gift For Aunty Ngā’). We also had a look at tivaevae (quilts) and used colourful paper to create our own design for a class tivaevae.

First we chose the colours

Then folded and cut one of the pieces of paper in half (diagonally).

Then we folded it in half again.

Next we cut out shapes on the folded piece.

Next we glued them together.

Finally we put them altogether to create two big tivaevae.  Don’t they look awesome?!?

 

Our school celebrated Matariki this week. We arrived, still in our pyjamas, really early (at 6am!) while it was still dark. Although it was chilly, the sky was clear. The celebration started with a karakia and song. We heard a story about some of the stars that are part of the Matariki constellation and had a chance to see the moon and some planets through a telescope. As it started to get lighter we had sausages and milo to help us warm up. There were games set up to play before school started.

 

In class we continued to learn more about Matariki. Our middle syndicate, Te Ana Ako, had a few activities including stories, word finds, games and creating a star from 8 pieces of folded paper

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Did you do anything to celebrate Matariki? Do you have any questions for us? Use the comments to let us know.

Kia Ora Bloggers,

This afternoon, Mr Riceman introduced us to the Ako Hiko coding challenge. It is a challenge that has been set up by the ambassadors (senior students) from the seven Ako Hiko schools.  We spent the afternoon exploring, reading and creating some code using two different sites, Compute It and Hour of Code. These are part of the beginner challenges.  We had to show resilience to solve problems and ask good questions to get others to help us. It was also lots of fun.  You can find out more by checking out the Ako Hiko coding challenge below.