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!