Brilliant Box Making

 Hi readers!

For maths, we have been learning a bit about nets. For anyone who does not what a net is, it a 2d piece of paper that can fold up into a 3d shape.

So we were tasked to make a box that could fit what we were given. Some people were given biscuits, some were given chocolate, and some were given lollies. I was given 3 chocolates, two were milk chocolate, and 1 was a boost. 

So I decided to make a cube where they were stacked on top of each other.

This was my net.

I made a net for a cube. I had to measure everything to make sure it all would fit perfectly. I then cut it up folded it up and taped it. I put the chocolate in there and it fits perfectly, then I tied a nice ribbon around it. Here is what it looks like.

It turned out nice but the ribbon just kept falling off.

Have you made a 3d shape with a net before?

Until next time!

Hangi

 Hi Readers

Like I said in an earlier blog post, we have been learning about the Maori culture. We have been talking about a Hangi. Which is when a roast is cooked underground. This originated in NZ and it is now a big part of the Maori culture.

You start your hangi by digging a hole in the ground big enough to fit all your food. Then you light the wood and volcanic rocks on fire. It is best to use volcanic rocks as normal rocks may explode. Then you can start preparing the food. Put the food that you wish to cook nearby. Clear away any wood that is still burning. A good time to start this process is when the rocks are white. Place the stones side by side in the hole. Then starting hitting the rock with a wet sack to create steam. Then start putting your meat in the hole, on the second layer, place the vegetables. Then put a wet sheet covering the food and make sure that it is covering the sides of the pit, not touching any stones. Then place the wet sacks over the food. Then cover the whole thing with dirt, make sure no dirt gets on your food. wait about three hours and then uncover food, being careful you don't get dirt on your food. Then take the food out and enjoy that hangi!

Here is the poster Jhana and I made,

Have you had a hangi before? If you have done it, does it taste good?

Until next time!

Magnificent Maori Culture

Hi readers!

For inquiry, we have been learning about the Maori culture. We did a task that was to learn about three things (Haka, Korowai, and Ta Moko) and write about how they have changed over time. I did this project with Jhana. These things are important to the Maori culture, which is why we did it.

Ta moko is a type of tattoo. People put it on there face and body using bone tools, and ink. It shows a social rank, and different tribes have different designs.

The Haka is a Maori war dance the maori people perform. It is most famous from the All blacks performing it before their rugby games.

The korowai is a maori clock made of feathers (Paper and real) tassels etc... It shows social status, and many leaders wear them.

 

There it is.

Do you know much about the maori culture? Have heard of these before? Have you tried doing the hake or have you ever worn a korowai?

Until next time!

My holidays + The start of term!

Hi readers!

How were your holidays and what did you do? Anything interesting? or did you just lounge around at home? (seems pretty good to me)

My family and I went to Punakaiki. We did lots of things, like walks. We also went caving, which was really fun, but a bit scary because it was completely dark and we needed our phone torches to help us see. We also went to the beach and we saw some very cool stones, which we took home. We also went out to eat a lot, and we did a treetops walk, which was scary, but very fun. We also stopped at Greymouth and went shopping!

Since it is the end of the first week, we have already done a lot of work. 

I am going to show you what I did for maths yesterday. We did tessellation. We had to use a variety of shapes to make a tessellation. A tessellation is a group of shapes that fit together with no gaps.

I made a tessellation with triangles, squares, and diamonds.

Here it is.

What have you been doing over the holidays? What have done so far this term?

Until next time!

It's NZ Sign Language Week

 Hi Readers!

Today we have been learning a bit about NZSL (New Zealand Sign Language) because of the fact that it is NZSL week!

NZSL is an official language for deaf people in NZ. It became an official language in 2006. NZSL is the language of the deaf New Zealander. Other countries have their own sign language as it is similar to countries having different languages. 

The first deaf school was opened in Christchurch in 1878 but in 1880 a group of teachers in Italy decided to ban the language. All deaf schools in NZ stopped teaching SL. This meant that if children were caught using SL, they would be punished. I was once again allowed in 2006. NZSL is a combination of hand shapes, facial expressions, and body movements.

NZSL is the natural language of the Deaf community in New Zealand; it reflects New Zealand culture by including signs for Maori terminology and concepts, which can not be found in other sign languages or countries.

As one of the country’s official languages, more than 24,000 New Zealanders use NZSL daily. It is also the 12th most frequently used language out of approximately 190 languages currently used in New Zealand (Since 2006).

So at school, we went on a site and learned many different things in sign languages like colours, fruits, numbers, letters, our name, more. 

Every time we get something right, we got a token, this is how many tokens it got.

Here our some letters in Sign Language

What your name in SL? Do you know NZSL? Did you know it was NZSL?

Until next time!

Creatively Coding a PSA

 Hi Readers!

For the past two weeks, we have been making a PSA on a website called codster. If you don't know what a PSA is it means Public Service Announcement. We had to make a PSA about any issue and make it on codster. 

I decided to make mine on bullying because I know that it is a big issue worldwide and it needs to be stopped.

Here is my python code for the PSA

It may look hard, but it is actually pretty easy to understand after you have been using it for a while. 

Because in some states it is illegal to share your work on a blog, there is no way I can embed my animation on my blog, so instead, I will just show you a series of pictures that would happen if watched and interacted with the animation

What do you think? Have you ever stood up to a bully before? What's the most interesting PSA you have seen before? 

Until next time!

Cool Carnival Games

 Hi readers!

In Numeracy (maths) we have been learning about gambling and the risk of it. One of the things we have done is played these online carnival games. They are all about gambling and how easy it is to lose everything.

Here are some screenshots of some of the carnival games.

Some are harder to win than others and I ended up with a total of 87 points, a paper clip, and a pin. We also did some other things about gambling. We made dice for Australia and New Zealand. The Australian dice had 1 miss and 5 goals because of there shooting percentages and NZ had 2 misses and 4 goals because of their shooting percentage. We then rolled a dice and did a tally chart of the number of misses and goals of each country. In some NZ won and in other Australia won.

Have you gambled before?

Until next time!

 

Children Books!

Hi readers,

In literacy, we have been learning a lot about children's books and the things children books have, like rhyme and repetition. We learned about multiple children book authors and their specialties in writing children's books.   

We then started writing our own children's books we had to have one of those language features. The book has to be illustrated by yourself and it has to have more than 5 pages.

My book is using rhyme and a little bit of repetition. It is about 12 pages long and the moral is that you should own up to your mistakes.

Here is the draft so far.

So that is the draft so far, I still have some rhyming to do but then I can start with the illustrations.

What is your favourite children book author? Have you tried writing a children's book before?

Until next time!

Parachute engineering!

Hi readers!

We have been learning a lot about rockets and we are going to start designing bottle rockets soon. But to test our engineering skills we had to make a parachute.

We were given lots of materials (paper, fabric, string, tape, etc) to make our parachute with. The parachute would have to safely bring to nuts to the ground. The slowest time would win.

Our first design didn't go so well, it hit the ground quickly and didn't catch enough air, it also broke whilst being stored away, this is what it looked like

So we all decided we were just going to make a new parachute with a completely new design. We made heaps of changes to the parachute, we changed the shape from a square to a circle and put paper on top of the fabric so less air could escape. We also used thinner string, it still held the nuts but made the parachute just a little bit lighter. That's the changes we made to our parachute and this is what it turned out to look like.

You can't see the string very well but just trust me when I say it's there.

It took 2.3 seconds to get down the floor, meaning it did pretty well. The difference between the beginning parachute and the end parachute was very big and I think my group did pretty well considering we were on a bit of time crunch (Because we had to make a completely new one)

Until next time!

Wonderful Weekly Mashup!

Hi Readers!

This is a weekly mashup for week 2 and what I have done. I am going to show you some Maths, and some Literacy. I'm going to start with maths.

For maths, we have been looking plotting points on a cartesian plane. we have also been working on finding coordinates. 

For this slide, we had to find the odd one out of the coordinates. To do this you had to check that the coordinates fit in the expression. Then you had to match the ordered pairs with the correct line (expression).

Next is literacy.

For literacy, we are learning about children's books, and our end goal is to write a children's book, but before we do that we were looking at different children's book authors. We started of by looking a Dr. Zuess, who is known for his poems and rhymes. We were tasked to make a poem, about absolutely anything and put it on a slide. Here is mine

What do think? Who your favorite children's book author? Have you made a rhyming poem before?

Until Next time!

Term 3 Week 1 Mashup!

Hi readers!
This is my first blog post of term 3. I feel that the holidays definitely were not long enough but oh well, we are back at school. So this is what we have done since school started.

The first thing I'm showing you is something we did on Wednesday. We were learning a bit about money and were given the task to go shopping for a family of four. One person is gluten-free, one is dairy-free, one is vegan, and one is normal. I did this task with Jhana and we managed to spend just under $170.

Here is the shopping list.

The second thing I am showing you is from literacy. For a while now we have been learning about different movie genre is film noir. We had to make a plot for a film noir movie. Here is mine!

Film Noir plot

The Dead detective

The plot for this story is that the detective is losing his job and the boss says that he needs to solve a case and he can keep his jobs, but if he can't he will be fired. The case he was given was a murder, a man was murdered in a restaurant and its the detective's job to solve it. The detective starts struggling with the case so he hires a private investigator to investigate each of the suspects each day. The investigator finds out the boos were the murder so he looks for more evidence and finds out the boss was giving him wrong leads and wanted him to lose him jobs because he was becoming a better detective then him.

The detective is poor, he grew with a wealthy family and they all died my a murder, they never found the murder and the detective said that he would be a better detective and help as many people as he could, but he had to be adopted. The family he was adopted to was not wealthy, in fact, quite poor. So when he left home he was left with a couple dollars, but he pursued his dream to become a detective, which is where he is now and trying to stay with his job.

He tells his colleagues about the boss and nobody believes. HE goes to reach for the evidence and it’s gone. He freezes and realizes about his loss. He is determined to keep going and run to the boss's office for evidence and sees the boss there. The boss heard the whole story and fired him, he had no chance of returning and went home. As he is walking out of the office he hears four gunshots, he runs back inside to see all but the boss dead, the detective gets shot. End of story.

What do think? Have watched a movie with the theme film noir? Who does the shopping in your house? Do you have any allergy that affects your diet?

Until next time!

Southern lights

Hi readers

We have officially finished our work on Matariki (for now at least) and so now we are learning a bit about the southern lights, also known as the auroral australis. The name aurora comes from the Roman goddess of dawn or the Latin word for sunrise.

The lights generally happen in the auroral zone, which is near the north and south pole. Aurora is caused by the atoms in the high altitude in within our atmosphere and energetically charged particles. Auroras are associated with solar winds that flow past earth. The winds flow from the sun and contain plasma particles that get pulled into the Earth's magnetic pole fields. As they accelerate towards the Earth, collisions occur between these ion particles and nitrogen and oxygen atoms in our atmosphere, releasing energy in the form of amazing aurora lights.

Now that you know what southern lights are I can tell you about what we were doing today!

We were making the lights using paint. It kinda hard to explain so here is a picture of what we're making!

The steps are pretty simple, that's why we got it done in a day

Here is my result

You notice the rather large stars in the sky and those are the Matariki stars! The teachers decided to put both the things we have been learning about into one single artwork so the artwork involves both the lights and the stars!

After looking at some videos of the southern lights I think it would a really cool thing to see and an amazing experience. Have you seen the southern or northern lights before? Have you seen the Matariki stars before?

Until next time!

Card Sorting

Hi Readers!

On Wednesday we have tech, but before we go to tech we always have to do something. This week we had to sort out a deck of cards.

We had to get into a group of four and we were given 200 cards to sort out. We got the cards from a pub in town and we had to sort them. But it was a bit more complicated. We had to write out what we were going to do and then we could only do what was on the paper and if we were caught doing something that wasn't on the paper we would have to start again.

I was in a team with Matilda, Jhana, and Caprice.

This was our instructions.

Our team came in 3rd place.

What do you think? Have you sorted cards before? If you did this challenge, what place did you come?

Until next time!

My Matariki Book

Hi readers!

Every Friday when are at kapa haka the people that are not doing kapa haka are given a task to complete. So for the past 3 weeks, we have been doing a task about Matariki. We were given many options to do about Matariki and I chose to make a book on book creator.

This book took me a while because I had to find images that had the same kind of art style, and I am no artist so there was no chance of me drawing them my self. But in the end, I found them.

So here is my book.


Link to my Book

What do you think? Have you seen the Matariki stars before? Have you made a book before? What do you know about the Matariki Stars?


Until next time!

Brilliant Blog Post Mashup

Hi readers!

This week's blog post is a mashup about my literacy and my numeracy! Today has been a pretty normal week and nothing special really happened at school but at home, I have had a pretty exciting week as I got a kitten!

To start the blog post off I am going to be showing you my literacy work. For literacy, we have been learning about the genre of movie horror. To learn more about the genre we watched a horror movie (in my opinion the movie we watched wasn't very scary but we were limited as to what we could watch.) The movie we watched was Hocus Pocus. It had all the horror movie cliches so it passed the horror movie check.

We were tasked to make a movie poster for Hocus Pocus. It to be somewhat scary and had to be related to movies as well, so that means it had to include a picture of some of the characters.

Here is my poster

Next is maths.

For maths, we are learning about sequences. For this, we did a sheet about the patterns that we had to work out.


Here it is

What do you think? What horror movies have you watched? Have you watched Hocus Pocus?

Until next time!

Interesting Irony Comic

Hi readers!

We have been doing many things for inquiry,  and one of them is learning about irony. For this task, we had to make a comic with the photos we took using some sort of irony. Then you would put it into a google drawing and add text bubble and then you were done.

There are three different types of irony. Dramatic irony, verbal irony, and situational irony. Dramatic irony is when the audience is in on something that the main character is not in on.  Me and Jhana (my friend) worked together to make a comic using dramatic irony.

Here it is 

What do you think? Do you read comics? Have you made a comic before?

Until next time!

Stunning Siapo

Hi readers!

It is a Wednesday, which means it is a tech day! We go on the bus around 12:00 so before that we do art! So for the past 2 weeks, we have been working on something called a Siapo.

One of the oldest and most important traditions of Samoa is the Siapo or Tapa.  It is a type of cloth made from the bark of the mulberry tree.  It is very time-consuming, because the bark must be harvested, stripped, separated, scraped, and beaten before it can be used.  It is then laid out in the sun to dry.

The artist uses natural dyes, created from items such as berries, bark, and nuts to make patterns on the cloth.  

There are 13 traditional patterns used on siapo that represent things common to Samoan cultures such as nets, coconut leaves, shells, and flowers.

So this is what I made!

What do you think? Have you made a Siapo before? Do you have Samoan in your jeans?

Until next time!

Marvelous Mashup!

Hi Readers!

This blog post is going to be a mash-up of my literacy and numeracy learning this week. It is mainly continuing things from last week and my last blog post but updated and better!

First up is my numeracy!

For numeracy one of my tasks was to figure out patterns, write the following numbers that continue on from the pattern, and then write the rules. Here is a screenshot of what I have done.

Some of them were pretty easy, while others took me a bit longer to work out.

Next is literacy. 

Once again we have been doing our website. Last time I blogged about it I had nothing on it and it was more planning, but now I am nearing the end of the website.

I while show you some pages from my website to you can get an idea of what the whole website looks like.

Here they are

What do you think? What have you done this week? Have you made a website before? If you have what was is about?

Until next time!

Amazing Abode!

Hi readers!

This week and last week we have been learning about korus and their significance to the Maori culture. Because of this, we have been making artworks using the korus.

After making our things we made a video showing all the planning, finished products, and information about the koru. Here is my video!

What do you think? What do you know about korus? Have you ever made an artwork with korus? Have you used abode spark before?

Until next time!

Koru Creation

Hi readers!

Something I have really been enjoying this week is art! We are making koru art. I quite enjoy art and was really glad when we started doing art again.

We used pastel, pencil, vivid, and dye. We started by drawing our koro design lightly with a pencil. Then we went over it in vivid to give it a darker outline. Then we used pastels to colour it in. We used an ombre effect to make it look a bit 3-d and shiny. After that, we used dye to colour in any leftover space.

I used cold colour pastels like green, blue, purple etc... and finished it off with a black dye background.

Here is what it looks like

Here it is

I would just like to mention that for some reason my picture is upside down.

What do you think? What colours would you choose? Have you done koru art before?

Until next time!

Amazing Angles!

Hi Readers!

This week in maths we have been looking at angles and polygons. We have been determining the interior angles of shapes as well as drawing some shapes using a compass- not a North/South compass, but a pair of compasses that you draw circles with.

This is some of the things I learned

Here are some of the examples of the work we have done

 What do you think? What do you know about angles? Have you ever drawn something other than a circle with a compass? 

Until next time!

Back At School!

Hi readers!

It is the first week back at normal school and it was great to see my friends and the teachers again. I'm going to show you what I have done for the first week back at school again.

For literacy, we have continued our theme of wizard of oz. This we started our essay, which instead of writing a normal essay we are making in the form of a website, which is something I have never done before. I think it is going to be a fun way to make an essay and I hope my website turns out good. I have only just started making my website I can't show you anything, as all you would see is empty pages, but hopefully I while be able to give you the link to my finished website soon.

For numeracy, we have been learning about angles. We have continued something we did during online school, which was putting our work onto a slide. So I will show you one of my slides.

The first slide is about the different angles, but the second slide is about the rules of angle.

Finally, Inquiry. For inquiry, we have been working on a box that someone will open in 40 years' time. We have been working on a letter about COVID-19, our experiences in quarantine, and the benefits it had of the environment that we will put in a box for the students of 2060 to open.

Here is my letter.

How was your first week back at school/work? What have you learned/done this week? Are you happy you are back at work/school

Until next time!

Terrific Tech, Marvelous maths, Lovley Literacy, and Fun friday tasks!

Hi readers!

This week I have been doing a lot of stuff, and it is that time when I share with you some of the stuff I have done this week! This includes my maths, literacy, my friend tasks, and my tech tasks!

I am going to start off with my literacy. For this activity, we were asked a question that was "if you needed and evil animal to help you what creature would it be?" It could have been anything, lots of people made animals up, we had to make our character, you could draw it or dress up family members, pet, etc..

Here is what I made!

That is my dog,  you can read the description to see what it is.
This activity was based on the wizard of oz because the wicked witches had winged monkeys to help her capture Dorothy.

Next is my maths.
For maths, we have been learning about the map. We learned how to find the coordinates of any place on the map. For the activity, I am going to show we were asked to pick we thought 7 places/things that we found interesting/cool or fun in New Zealand and find the coordinates and write a small description about the place. Here is mine

These were the places I chose, the coordinates, a small description, and a picture

Next is my Friday activity I chose to make a drawing of a house on the back of any animal. I chose to make mine on the back of a turtle because their backs are quite flat and the move slowly so the house doesn't fall off.

Here is a picture of it

 Now because it is on the back of a turtle it is falling over a bit. I and my family would live in this house with me and we would travel the world on the back of a turtle, which can swim with the house on it's back.

Finally, my tech activity.
I choose to make a set of jewelry with stuff I could find around the home. For the necklace, I used string and wooden pegs. Here is what it looks like.

For the ring and bracelet, I used the same string a twisted it round and pined it together as I wanted to keep a theme as it was a set and the peg were too big for the ring and bracelet.

This is what it looks like!

What do you think? Are you excited to go back to school/work? If you have to build a house on the back of an animal what animal would you choose? Have you had any takeaways yet?

Until next time!