Fiafia Day

On Friday it was Fiafia Day. Our parents came to our classroom at 9am to see our amazing artwork and all the great learning we have done this year. Then we did a performance for them. We performed the song, Uira, which is about the Maori god of thunder and lightning. We looked pretty cool! If you'd like to hear the song, play the slideshow and you'll hear it!

The Edublog Awards

This week, we were lucky enough to be nominated by Room 9 Nelson Central as the Class Blog of the year. On Wednesday, we heard that we had made the finals! This is a global award and there are many schools competing around the world. We are very grateful to Room 9 Nelson Central for nominating us and also very proud of ourselves for all the work we have done this year. We have had lots of fun!

If you're visiting here from edublog, please check out all the exciting things we have done over the year! If you'd like to vote for us, click here, scroll down to find our name, and then press vote!

Science: How to make candles (heat and light)

To finish off our learning about sound, movement, electricity, magnetism, heat and light, we made candles! It was heaps of fun and very messy.

First we made a hole in the centre of a yoghurt pot, then we threaded the wick through the hole and tied it to a skewer at the top of the pot to keep the wick straight.

Next, we put in anything special that we wanted to add, like glitter, beads, buttons and leaves. Then it was time to add the wax! We got to choose different colours to make our candles. Ashleigh melted the wax in a pot for us, and then poured it into our yoghurt container.

Finally, we left our candles to set in trays overnight. Tomorrow we will be able to remove them from the yoghurt pot. We can't wait!

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.

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!

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!

Calendar Scraffitos

These are the last scraffitos that Room 10 will be doing this year. We made these for the calendars that our parents can buy for next year. So parents, see if you can pick which one will be coming to your house sometime soon! As for Room 10, we're moving on and will be looking at construction this term, specifically the construction of robots. Look out for those later in Term 4!

Harvesting Radishes and Lettuce from our Garden

Earlier last term, the Kauri team planted vegetables in our school garden. We have been watering them and looking after them since then. We got back to school this term to find that all our vegetables had grown! The radishes and the lettuce were ready to eat so today we harvested them. We brought bread and some other fillings from home and together with the lettuce and radishes, made ourselves yummy sandwiches! They tasted delicious and we had lots of fun.

Trip to Waitakere Gymnasium

Today Room 10 and the Kauri Team went to the Waitakere Gymnasium. We got to use heaps of cool equipment and practice lots of fantastic moves at different stations. Then we did a sculpture walk in Olympic Park, which was hard work since it was raining! We had a great time today and hope we get to go back again in the future!

Kid Pix Diagrams

Because we are learning all about animals and report writing, we drew our animal and labelled it's features in Kid Pix. Here are some of our finished diagrams!

Visual Art: Scraffito Panels

Here are Room 10's finished scraffito panels, which took us about 5 weeks to finish. They were a lot of work! We talked about hot and cold colours, creating a contrast, shape, patterns and how to use space effectively when creating our masterpieces. Each panel was designed and created by one person who had to work together with their group of three to make their panels look like part of a whole. Have a look at the results!

Algebra Fun Day

Today in Room 10 we had Algebra Fun Day! This meant that we got to do algebra all day. We learned all about patterns, how to find the next number in a pattern and work out what the rule is, and also how to use "greater than, less than and equal to" signs. We learned lots and had heaps of fun. Check out our pictures to see our cool day!

Zoo Trip

On Thursday, the Kauri Team went to the zoo to gather information for our report writing. We walked there from school through Western Springs. At the zoo, there were lots of animals for us to choose from for our reports. We also visited the Education Centre where Jen talked to us about Orangutans and Kiwi and how their habitats are changed. Then we had the long walk home, which really tired us out! It was an exciting day.

Grandparents Day and Book Week

This week was Book Week at Grey Lynn School. We celebrated by reading exciting books and having different teachers read to different classes every day. Today was also Grandparents Day, so our grandparents came to see our class, and we showed them around the school, especially the library, where they were allowed to donate a book if they wanted! They also looked at our art (the scruffito drawings) as part of the Art Exhibition.

The day finished with a character parade. The Kauri Team dressed up as animals from any book we had read which tied in with our Animal Heroes theme. Costume winners were chosen based on originality, connection to a book, and whether they had used stuff at home to make the costume. Watch the clip and see our winners, as well as the rest of our fun day!

Term 3 Art Project - Scruffito

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For art this term, we are learning all about painting. We are also experimenting with a technique called Scruffito, where you colour in a piece of paper with crayons or pastels, paint over it with black paint, and then scratch patterns into it. We also added painted animals, since animal heroes are our topic this term. Here are the finished results of Room 10's first try at scruffito!

Kelly Sports

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This term we are practicing Report Writing. Here is our report, which we wrote as a class, on our Friday experience at Kelly Sports.

Kelly Sports is a sports programme that happens after school on a Tuesday on our school field or courts. Once a term a person from Kelly Sports shows their activities to Grey Lynn School kids. Jeremy works at Kelly Sports.

Jeremy teaches a game called "Fishing." One person has a net and the other has two tennis balls. The first person throws the tennis balls and the other person has to try and catch them in the net.

Another game is called "Chopsticks Catching." The game requires one person. The person throws the ball and then catches it with two or three fingers like chopsticks. This game requires lots of skill.

A third game involved passing a rugby ball over one persons head, and then under the other persons head, before doing the "washing machine" where the two people pass their ball around their waists while standing back to back.

Kelly Sports teaches skills like passing a ball, catching, throwing and skill for playing games like ripper rugby, hockey and soccer.

100 Days of Learning Celebration

Today we celebrated 100 days of learning at school this year. We did lots of fun activities to do with 100: for fitness we did 100 star jumps, we worked out facts like which day was 100 days after our birthday for maths, and we drew what we thought we'd look like when we're 100 and wrote a description for writing. We're also trying to fill our 100 minutes of reading thermometer this week!

Another fun thing today was making fairy bread using 100s and 1000s. We also dressed up using the number 100, and the Kauri Team tried to bring more than 100 cans to give to Auckland City Mission. We definitely succeeded!

We had a school assembly on the court and presented some items to our parents to celebrate 100 days of learning. The Kauri Team sung a fantastic song and did our Kauri Team cheer, which was really loud. All our parents were really impressed with us. It's been a great day!

Keeping Ourselves Safe: Talking and Listening

Here are the latest brainstorms Room 10 have made during Keeping Ourselves Safe. We talked about what we liked about speaking and listening, practiced speaking to each other and listening to our friend's answered, and then brainstormed what we enjoyed about doing this with our friends. Here are the results!