Farewell Class of 2012

Happy holidays everyone! Have fun, stay active, relax a little, be kind to your brothers and sisters and help your parents out :) Thankyou awesome Room 9 parents for your support. It has been fantastic getting to know you and I have appreciated your input and our chats.

Waiata

There were a few uncomfortable grins, downcast eyes and faces hidden behind long hair for our first video of Room 9 singing a waiata.  But after watching ourselves on film we decided it would look better appearing confident even if we didn't feel it inside!  So we did another take (or 2 or 3?).

We've sung this waiata in the mornings to help us learn the days of the week and improve our pronunciation of te reo.  What do you think?  Ka pai?

Ko te aha tēnei rā? from JB on Vimeo.

Here is the maori/english translation:

Ko te Mane, rā tahi, mahi au e

Ko te Tūrei, rā rua, kia kaha e

Ko te Wenerei, rā toru, pupuritia

Ko te Tāite, rā whā, ka heke e

Paraire, ka mutu ngā mahi e

Hatarei, Rāhoroi, tākaro e

Rātapu, ka tau, ka inoie

Ka mutu ngā rangi o te wiki e

It's Monday, day one, and I'm working

It's Tuesday, day two, and staying strong

It's Wednesday, day three, and persevering

It's Thursday, day four, and getting tired

It's Friday, day five, and work is over

It's Saturday and time to play

It's Sunday, time for rest and prayer*

These are the days of the week.

*Note:  if you are religious of course!

Solar Eclipse

A family member, in her own words "risked permanent damage to her eyeballs" to take these fabulous shots of the solar eclipse viewed from H-town.  A truely fascinating ocurrance to observe.  This will be the most complete eclipse that we in New Zealand will see until.... July 22, 2028!  My keen mathematicians - so how many years is our wait?

Science Expo Poems still coming in strong...

Science Expo Poems from Educ8JB

Pascal's Triangle by Carlos, Dhusar & Danny

Pascal’s Triangle by Carlos, Dhusar and Danny from Educ8JB

"Sticky Noting" what we hope to learn for Bike Week

Wallwisher now called Padlet is a bulletin board type programme that operates in real time i.e you see the changes as they happen. Children can add sticky notes with questions or sticky notes with information and website links for others to read. Very useful when brainstorming as I am able to put the bulletin board up on our class smartboard while the children are adding their notes and links. Did we get silly notes on the board for all to see? Yes definitely - the beauty of exploring and having fun with a new programme!

Catapult captured in action

Some edited footage (taken by Daniel and Aidan) of the catapult in action AND a little more about the workings of the catapult explained...

The Catapult by Daniel and Aidan

Daniel and Aidan have put together a poster on the Catapult they built along with two boys from Room 23 and with Mr Cavanah's expertise and know-how.  We're thinking it might be great for launching water balloons for our end of year "let go" celebrations!  

More Science Fair Poems

Here's what Anna and Brenna have to share.

Senior Science Expo 2012

The video is finished!  Hurray!  We love using iMovie - it's so easy.

Our Calendar Art

It's that time of year where you can order your child's calendar art to adorn that home or office wall space and especially at Grandma & Grandpa's place.   You can view samples of actual printed work, in the school office before ordering.

Under the lovely guidance of Mrs Lynch, the children sketched daffodils in pencil and pastel and penned poems to accompany the artwork.  Then myself (Mrs Bell) assisted the children to put their handiwork together.  Here is the result.  Please note the children had a choice of photo backgrounds, border or no border and a choice of a few different fonts - so there is slight variation.  What we love about these is how the sketches appear to be growing tall out of the background.  We hope you like!

Science Expo through the eyes of Poetry

Our Science Expo has been and gone and what a fantastic opportunity it was for our senior children to demonstrate and teach to their fellow "Hillcresters".

A video is in the making and will be posted soon, but in the meantime here are a few poems about the expo for your reading - Samantha and Olivia are sharing.

Science Expo Preparations - dominoes, toilet rolls, marbles, bits & pieces everywhere!

Busy, busy, busy.... designing, creating, testing, redesigning... Rube Goldberg would be proud...

Simple Machines - Lever Exploration

Shaun and Anna went to Google and also took a look at some of our Simple Machines topic books to find out more about Levers.  They discovered that there are actually 3 different classes of Levers.
So this week we explored these different classes of levers and figured out how they work to make lifting heavy weights easier for us.

Thanks to Mr Peart's fantastic suggestion, we made a giant lever out of a plank of wood from Mr Kavanagh's shed (there are all sorts of things in there!) and a wooden triangle from the P.E shed.
Then we needed a "load" to lift and Taine kindly volunteered.  We wondered who could lift up Taine by themselves and Danny seemed confident, so we let him have a go.  Unfortunately Danny's muscles failed him and he couldn't lift up Taine very high at all!  So we put Taine on one end of our lever and checked out if Danny could lift him using the lever instead.  What do you know?!  Danny was much stronger using the lever and could lift up Taine quite easily!  Some of us wanted to do a running jump onto the lever to see how high Taine could projectile up in the air - but we might save that for another day when we can make sure the flying person doesn't get hurt.

For the rest of the session, groups had turns using our big lever and changing the position of the fulcrum, load and effort.  The class also found things in the classroom to create their own mini levers with and took photos of them - check them out:

Our discoveries

Levers work by multiplying the effort exerted by the person that is is using the lever.  It seemed that the greater the distance between the effort force and the fulcrum, the heavier a load can be lifted with the same effort force.