Robot Construction

Yesterday was robot making day! We spent all morning gluing, tying, nailing, taping and fitting together our recycled plastic and metal objects to make or robots. We had some fantastic parent helpers who made sure we were safe using the hot glue guns, sawed and drilled for us, and helped our robots to come to life!

Next we got to choose a colour to spray paint our robots, and we taped over any parts that we didn't want sprayed. Our lovely parents then spray painted them for us and we left them in the sun to dry.

Finally, we added the finishing touches, unwrapping any covered bits, adding extra decoration and fixing up any bits that had fallen off. We are very proud of our finished robots and think they look amazing.

Thanks to Toni, Donald, Julie and Peter for all their help!

Photos by Jennifer.

Maui and the Sun: Retelling Maori Stories

This week, Group A have been reading all about the trickster Maui and how he slowed the sun. They then retold the story in eight points and made those points into a play. They practiced and practiced their play until it was perfect. Then they performed it for the class and for you! We hope you enjoy watching.

Robot Preparation: Sketches

We are going to be constructing our robots this week, so in preparation we have sketched the plan of what we hope they look like. We then created a charcoal drawing of our robots, complete with their names. We also made a crayon and indian ink creation of our design. Now we know exactly what we want them to look like, we're ready to begin building!

EOTC at Grey Lynn Park

Continuing our EOTC experience, today we went to Grey Lynn Park to do a scavenger hunt. We had to count and name the sculptures there, count the number of rubbish bins and answer lots of other hard questions! We also had to find objects that went with different adjectives, like prickly, tall and heavy. Then we played Castle as a final activity. Phoenix took heaps of photos of us while we were doing all these cool things. Check out her awesome photography!

Our Trip to MOTAT

On Wednesday, the Kauri Team went to MOTAT. MOTAT is short for Musuem Of Transport And Technology. We went there to learn more about electricity. We learned about electrons, conductors and insulators from a man called Frazer. We did an electricity trail around MOTAT and saw heaps of cool things like the Victorian Village, old forms of transport, the boiler room and lots more!

We also went to the Challenge Zone, where there were lots of fun activities to do like building a small bridge, the kaleidoscope room, looking in a mirror that made you look short and fat, and there was even a mirror where you could shake your own hand!

Another area was Sports Alive! There was a rowing race, a running track where you could test your own speed, there were places to shoot balls into hoops, there was a rugby ball you could kick into a net to see how fast your kick was, and a balancing machine that sees how long you can balance for.

We had a really fun time at MOTAT and we hope that we can go there again soon!

Kid Pix Animation: Building Robots

Our robot construction project is underway! Today we divided up all of the junk we have collected. We sketched the design of our robots, and soon we will begin to assemble them. Jennifer made a slideshow which shows how she might build her robot, piece by piece. Check out her awesome work!

Science Concepts: Gravity

This Kid Pix slideshow by Robbie shows gravity in action. His leaf slowly falls from the tree and hits the ground. Watch the movement happen!

Science concepts: Magnetism

We're learning all about electricity, movement, sound, light and magnetism this term. We learned that magnets have a north and south pole, and that unlike poles attract each other while like poles repel each other. Celia chose to show this by making an animation in Kid Pix. Check it out!

Martin Horspool's Robots

Since we're going to be building robots soon, we had a fantastic guest speaker in to tell us all about how he does it. Martin Horspool builds amazing robots which he sells to people. He builds his robots out of things that have been thrown away. He showed us some of his cool robots and then explained how we could join different parts together to make our robots. He also answered heaps of questions for us so we're feeling almost ready to begin constructing our own robots!