Summer Learning Journey starts in Room 8

Here are a few Summer Learning Journey Post from students this week.

EOTC Week

Here is a video from our trip to Ferrymead. We went back in time to be children in a 1860's school.

Video Link

Athletics Day

By Eddie

How to be ready to learn and 'On the Bus'

By Caitlin

Trusted Trekkers on Retaliation and choosing how you react.

We have been thinking about how we react in situations where people might annoy us or do something we don't like. Here is a video made by HPS Trusted Trekkers that we watched this morning to get us thinking about our own behaviour.

Click here to visit our class site and watch this video.

Writing News Reports

After reading the story 'The Bear and the Piano' we wrote  book reviews. Then we wrote a news report. We could choose at what part of the story we wrote the report. Had the bear just got to the city and amazed people with his piano playing or later in the story, when the bear had turned his back on fame and fortune and gone back to the forest. Here are some of our reports.

Here is a report from Caitlin.

Here is a report from Connor

Here is a report from

Information reports

We have been writing information reports about topics we have had in reading this term.
Here is Liyahn's report.

Xavier's

Love's

Play our Description Games.

Here is an example of our games.
Check out our student blogs for more games. 
Student blogs
This is from Isaac.

Click here to compare your pirate with mine.

Our Stories presented in Book Creator

Room 8 have been writing stories in Term 2. Our focus has been to create a story with a clear orientation, problem and solution. Once we had completed out stories we published them using Book Creator. This was an exciting way to produce quality work, as many students decided to re-craft their stories once they had started copying them into Book Creator and adding images.

Click here to read The Shark and the Robot Story

 Click here to Read Fred and the Spooky Amusement Park

Click here if you want to read The Earthquake story.

Click here to read The Ultimate Sword Fight Story

Room 8 Assembly News Report Video

For assembly the students wanted to create a 'Green Screen' video in the style of a news report.   

It shows some of the things we have been getting up to in our learning. 

                                  Room 8 Site - Click here to watch our Term 2 Assembly Video.

Pacific Group Tau'olunga

Several students from Room 8 are in the Pacific Group. The girls learned the beginning of a Tau'olunga dance from Moli, a relative of Miss Harris. She was visiting from Tonga and performed the whole Tau'olunga which tells a story about her village. They performed at assembly yesterday.
Malama was a fantastic leader of the group. Faufaua!

      

Anzac Animals - By Khiel and Riley

        Here is a post from Khiel ,with a very informative slideshow on Anzac Animals.

Below Khiels,  is a slideshow from Riley with some other Anzac Animals. 

,                     

 Kia ora. In reading time our group and another are learning about Anzac Animals ( If you don't know what an Anzac Animal is, it is  animals that went to war). Our group did a slide show about Anzac Animals, the process was kind of interesting because we learnt some new things about the war. We also learnt about animals that we thought would never go to war like donkeys and camels. -Khiel

                     

Mummifying Apples in Room 7 & 8

In our Ancient Egyptian Topic, we have been learning about Egyptian Mummies.
We thought it would be fun to do some investigating in science, using similar mummifying salts as the Natron salt that the Egyptians used.  (Natron salt) came out of the ground. Each group had to mummify two pieces of apple. They had to mark them A and B and choose from the different recipes of Baking Soda and Salt combinations. Some groups tried all salt, or all baking soda, some more of one that the other, or equal amounts.
We had to make predictions what would happen, and write our ideas down. After three days, one week, two weeks and a month we tip them out into an ice cream container, brush off the salt/soda, observe and weigh the apple pieces. We record the weights on sheet.
After two weeks, most are looking brown and dry, just like a mummy skin. But some recipes have made the apple go mouldy and a bit damp. All have lost weight.  We have a control apple piece which is just sitting in the jar with no salts. It has lost weight too, but not as much as the others.
We will post an update after the final examination and weighing in two more weeks.

Here are some photos of our science.

Brushing off the salt/soda 

Our control Apple

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Cartouches

We are studying Ancient Egypt this term. We have been learning about Egyptian hieroglyphs.  We all made a cartouche with our name in hieroglyphs.  Ancient Eqyptians believed that if their name was engraved into a cartouche, they would survive in the 'afterlife'.
You can use this website to type in hieroglyphs.

Click here for typewriter.



Cartouches made by children in Room 8.   (Right- a real cartouche)

Life Education with Harold and Siobhan

Life Education

Room 8 had two sessions with Siobhan and Harold in the Life Education truck this week.  We were focusing on  friendship and our amazing brains.

We discussed what were above and below the line things to do as a friend.

Being a good friend requires having empathy.  We were learning the steps to feel and show empathy.

We enjoyed having the coloured lights and stars inside the truck. As a reward we had a dance party at the end of our last session.

Duffy Theatre

A few weeks ago Duffy Theatre performed a fantastic show about Duffy getting sucked into a game. Children in Room 8 wrote a retell after the show.

The Duffy Theatre Show

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Animating our Rhyming Couplets

We had fun writing our rhyming couplets. We made a list of things about ourselves, then found ways to make them rhyme. We talked about the best outcome was to have the same numbers of syllables in each line of the pair. Sometimes this was hard to do.

To publish our work, we learnt how to animate slides, this made reading our poems more interesting.

Here are some examples of student work. You can animate objects on one slide as many times as you like. Khiel took his further and put each couplet on separate slides and inserted transitions too.

Animal Inspired Art - By Kelis

Here are some other Animal paintings from Room 8 students.

Our favourite place in the classroom.

Our Class Treaty

To make our class treaty we decided to research other class treaties. Each buddy pair wrote down the three 'class rules' they felt were most important to them. We then grouped our results together as a class and found the most popular ideas that we valued the most.

As we are seniors, we decided not to include simple rules that we should know already, such as having kind hands. Instead we focused on ideas such as teamwork and having a safe learning space to make mistakes. We also want to celebrate our learning and successes.

 

Ms Clifford also has her special poster as a reminder..