Little WHAM!

On Tuesday of week 9 we performed at Little Wham. In the morning we danced...

In the afternoon we performed our dramas, cultural dance, sound art and showed our visual art. Our audience told us that our message was clear and they really enjoyed our performances!

Week 8

Amazing Home Learning

Our Home Learning Task was to make an artwork using geometrical shapes. What a great variety of artworks came to school in week 8. Our artwork also had to have a message. Our messages were amazingly varied too!

Some of us made 3D artworks

Some were 2D

They were all fantastic!

Week 7

This week we have practised our dance for Little Wham. That's when we will perform our dances and dramas and sound art and show our visual art.

We have one more week to practise! We are also trying to win the class prize for selling the most WHAM tickets for Big Wham on Sept 20th-that's next Friday.

We are busy problem solving in Maths using our fractions skills and have been recrafting a piece of writing for our portfolios.  In Reading we have been using the ipads to scan QR codes which take us straight to the website we need to use. Very clever!

Week 6

Another exciting week in Room 14. First of all Lyn Kriegler, a real life author, illustrator and puppeteer visited our school and spent time talking with us, answering our questions and sharing her stories with us. As one of us said "We had an awesome time with her."

Lyn told us a story with her puppets about a baby dinosaur and one of the punga people.

Then on Friday Rhythm Interactive performed in the Hall. There were 233 Juniors and Middles in the Hall and each of us had a drum!  John and Lucie from Rhythm Interactive taught us rhythms to play, they showed different kinds of instruments and we played and played those drums. Even the people not in the Hall must have heard us. It was great!

WHAM is coming

Tickets available at School Office ..... going fast!

Week 5

Week 5 already! We were a bit sad this week that our netball coaching sessions have ended. We have had some great coaching and on the last day we were able to play a game of netball using the skills we had learned. Here we are in action.

                                                                             

We also had our last dance lesson for a couple of weeks while our dance teachers are on university holidays. As well as all this we have all presented our Home Learning Task AND carried on with our learning in reading,(inferring) writing (implying) and maths (fractions and geometry). Our second Arts rotation started this week too. This time we were able to choose which Arts discipline we would do.

Week 4

On Friday we visited Te Tuhi Centre for Creative Arts. We performed our version of the Rainbow Fish, learned about the way that stories are told and reasons for story telling, made posters about the story, and viewed some amazing art work.

Earlier in the week we had another dance session with our teachers from the University of Auckland, finished our prints after the style of Jo Ogier, a New Zealand printmaker who has been our model artist, continued our work on inferring in Reading, implying in Writing and fractions and geometry in Maths! We also found time for some more netball coaching. All in a week's learning.

Hide and Seek

In our writing we are learning to imply, that means to give clues about what's happening rather than just telling.

We read a poem called Hide and Seek and then we wrote our own sentences implying that we were hiding. All of our sentences have been organised to make this verse of a poem.

Here I come, ready or not!

I crawl under my bed. The dust tickles my feet.

No one will find me in this dark, spooky place.

I stay in the dark shadows.

My chest fills up with excitement. I can hear them,

giggling just above my bed.

I am still and small. I stay really still. 

They won’t be able to find me here.

I try not to breathe.

Waiting for someone to find me.

I’ve got to stay still and quiet.

I won’t move. I won’t move a muscle.

I won’t say a thing.

Nobody can see me. I’ll stay forever quiet.

They will never find me here.

It’s been a long time, they still haven’t found me.

The voices of my friends fade away.

I am safe now.

I feel like I’m invisible.

By Room 14

Week 3 in Rm 14

This week we have experienced being artists - visual artists, dancers and mime artists! We were also the audience for a performance of And the Winner is... .
We have had our second netball coaching session, continued to develop our inference skills in reading and when we write we are learning to imply. Keep a look out for our poem next week. We are also busy with our learning about fractions and finding a fraction of a set as well as our times table and geometry learning. Phew!

Dancing

Watching

Working as a team

Printmaking

Week 2

It has been another busy week. We started our dance lessons with dance students from the University of Auckland...

                        

completed the second round of our Arts rotation AND began netball coaching.

Term 3

Here we are back again after the holidays.
Already one week has passed.
Our topic this term is.....
We have a message. How do we communicate it creatively?
This week we have been having a taste of the Arts, learning about inferring, geometry and fractions. We've visited the school library and enjoyed seeing the changes there that will help us use the library to find information more easily.We are keeping an Arts reflection journal and are looking forward to the many experiences that are ahead of us in Topic as well as the other learning areas.
Keep watching our blog to keep up to date with what we are learning this term.

Ta Dah!

Finally on the last day of the term it was fine enough for the drain painting group to get painting their slogans next to two of the storm water drains at school. This is so everyone who goes past these drains could be reminded that these drains lead straight to the sea and not to put any rubbish down them.

No Rubbish Down This Drain!

Working together to get the job done.

Drains Lead To Sea

Carefully does it!

What happens next........ how will we know if we have been successful in keeping rubbish out of the school drains so that only water flows to the sea and our beaches?
Two of the junior classes are working on keeping leaves out of the drains and we will do another audit of all 26 school drains next term to see if there is less rubbish being put in them.

The Bee Lady

Today we had a visit from the Bee Lady. She is a kaitiaki too. She cares about bees. She told us they are super important because they pollinate 80% of all the flowers, fruit and vegetables. There are about 20,000 different kinds of bees. Only Honey Bees make honey. They make honey to feed on.
People like to eat their honey too and we tasted some today. We also made candles out of bees wax, answered quiz questions and labelled the parts of a bee.

But that wasn't all......

We also went to visit Rooms 8 and 9 and shared a story with them about a stream that wasn't looked after and became polluted because people kept putting the wrong things into it.

Then today we delivered this letter to each of the classes in the school. We felt very proud, happy and special to be able to share what we had learned and to be asking others to help too. We also  took the posters we had made to some of the classrooms too.

Dear Stanhopers,

We have learned that stormwater drains all lead to the sea, so we have decided to pass this message on to you.

Our school has at least 26 stormwater drains, and there is rubbish down every single one of them! This rubbish goes out into the sea and harms all sea creatures.

Save our seas by not littering near stormwater drains.

Be a KAITIAKI today!!!

From Room 14

Keep reading our blog to find out what our next action is!!!

Poster Parade

Today at morning play some of us took our poster cards that we had painted out into the playground. We showed our slogans to the rest of the school, to the teachers in the staffroom and to Ms Tafa in her office. Some of the juniors needed us to tell them what the posters said. Some of the seniors cheered and asked questions and we asked them if they knew why we didn't want them to put rubbish down the stormwater drains.
We really enjoyed letting the rest of the school know about stormwater drains leading to the sea. We might even do this again tomorrow! But there is still more to come.

Ready to go!

Hmm what does that say?

Do you know why we don't want rubbish down the drains?

Back to the Stormwater Drains

We decided that the rest of the school needs to know that stormwater drains go straight to the sea because there is a lot of rubbish in our school drains. Whatever goes down a stormwater drain will end up in the sea. It's not like dirty water from our houses that is treated and cleaned before it is released out to sea again, stormwater just goes to the sea! So rubbish, oil, paint, detergent all end up in the sea and effect sea life as well as our beaches.
We decided that....
the rest of the school needed to know and our parents and families need to know this too.
So... we are making posters, making signs, telling a story, designing drain messages and writing a letter.
Here we are hard at work. keep reading our blog to find out what we are going to do!

Poster makers

Designer

Painters

The drain painters practising

Concentration!