Week 5

Gardening

Since we last wrote the blog a few things have happened in our garden.

Caleb, Karion, Nick, Bryce, Chloe and Isabel worked with Isabel’s mum to put fertiliser and sheep pallets (smarty tablets) on our garden, this was to help make the garden ready for the plants.

After watering the gardens heaps it was time to plant some of the plants that Isabel and Kimberley had been out to buy.

Shohei, Te Ahu, Nikita and Isabel with our amazing parent helper Isabel’s mum,  planted some vegies in our garden. Kids in the middles and juniors have also planted the other gardens.

We have received lots of bits and pieces from families in our class, seeds, sprinklers, containers and more. Thank you to all these wonderful people.

The ZingBokashi’s have arrived and we will begin using them soon.

The worm farm has been cleaned out and we are waiting for the worms to arrive then we can start                                                       feeding them.

What’s in the box?

In literacy we are learning to describe objects and write descriptions.

We brought something from home that we could put in our stationery box. In pairs we then had to write descriptive clues so the reader could try and guess what is inside the box. The clues were to get more and more obvious as you read on. The writing is on the outside of the box, and then the reader can open the box and inside is the object that was described. They look really cool and we are looking forward to testing them out on other classes. 

Census

Today is Census day in New Zealand, so today the seniors carried out their own census. We watched a clip from the breakfast show which told us why the census is so important.

Here are some facts we learnt about the census.

· It is the first census in 7 years (the last one wasn’t held due to the Christchurch Earthquake).

· Everyone in NZ must fill in the census forms, either online or in the booklets.

· The census helps work out where the government spends money on things like, health, education and transport.

We worked in partners to complete a booklet full of different questions. Examples of the questions are:

· Age in years

· What is your height?

· What is your popliteal length? (This is when you sit on a chair and measure from behind your knee to the ground!)

· What is the main way you get to school?

· What is your favourite school subject?

Today all we had to do is collect the data, later in the term we will enter the data onto the website.www.censusatschool.org.nz

Once we have done this we will be able to look at all the data and make comments about the treads, just like NZ statistics will do for the real census.

  

Creating a book on the iPad

We made a book on our iPad using the app Book Creator. Each person had to choose one of the 3R’s that was the most important to them. They then had to write a description of why it was the most important to them. We had to take a photo of ourselves and insert this into the page. The next step, and the hardest, was recording ourselves saying what we had written. Each person had their own page, which came together to make a book. Hopefully we can share this soon.

By Tommy, Kimberley, Micayela and Liam

 Ratburger

We are reading the book Ratburger by David Walliams. This is the same author as the book Gangsta Granny and Mr Stink that Room 13 read last year.

This book is about Zoe who loses her pet hamster and finds a baby rat which she smuggles to school. She gets suspended. This is as far as we have gotten. We have made some great connections, especially text to text because there are lots of similarities to the other David Walliams books we have read.