Action Stations Day!!

Sorting out what we had

The kids PE shed

Today we had a great day of "Actions Speak Louder than Words" - our focus for this term.

Before

After

The big sack
of rubbish!

Moana 3 buddied up with Room 10 and worked on tidying and sorting the kids PE shed and doing a massive 'Womble Parade' around the perimeter of our school grounds.


Moana 2 buddied up with Room 6 and did a 100m squared beach clean up, then sorted the rubbish into type!  Pretty shocking the amount of rubbish that was collected in a small area...

The whole school went down to the beach for lunch and walked back along the beach to school doing a beach clean-up as we went.

Read more below from each class...

Moana 3
Half of our group cleaned out, sorted and reorganised the kids PE shed.  We were pretty happy with the outcome - now we just have to make some signs and get some issuing and returning systems in place to keep our new look shed super tidy!

Awesome buddy class helpers!

Sorting the rubbish 

The other half cleaned up rubbish from around the outskirts of school, under decks and classes... we found a whole big black rubbish bag full of rubbish!  Most of the rubbish we found was muesli bar wrappers... this made us think about having 'Litter Free Lunchboxes'...

We think we will have some more cool Actions Speak Louder than Words projects up our sleeve for the rest of the term.

Moana 2

First, we had to measure a 100m square area and mark it out.  This was our first challenge and it took a little while to mark out our area for collection.  When we first glanced at our 100m square, we couldn't see any obvious rubbish, but when we investigated more closely, we soon discovered the hidden mess on our beach.  After just over an hour of scouring, we had collected more than we estimated.

 

When we got back to school we sorted and weighed each category of rubbish.  Would you believe that we picked up 187.997kg of waste that did NOT belong on our beautiful beach?

Although the category with the largest amount of waste was plastic, the weight of all of the rubbish combined was astonishing!

We have started trying to create an infographic of our findings and hope to share them with you soon.

Catapults for TinkerLab!

Today for TinkerLab our challenge was to make catapults!

Koka Ngaire and Koka Rachel gave us:
- 15mins
- 8 iceblock sticks
- 5 rubber bands
- one bamboo spoon

Our challenge was to create a catapult capable of getting a pompom over the 3 metre line in buddies!

We created first... lots of talking, collaborating, thinking, trying out, thinking, making changes and perseverance.
We then came back together to share.  Some were more successful than others!

This was our learning.  We also looked at some other successful catapults and discussed how we needed to create a 'bounce' or resistance to create force and distance.

We then had another create time.  We all made changes/improvements and then came back together to share again.  This time a lot of the catapults made it over the 2m mark and Giacomo, Jamai, Lani and Taj got their's over the 3 metre mark!

It was a lot of fun!

RUN NZ - Cross country training

Term 3 has started and it is nearly cross-country time!
We have been enjoying some wonderful winter sunshine and today we got serenaded by Steffen while we ran our laps!







We have a great incentive with our cross country running this term - we are aiming to run as much of NZ as we can.  We have 5 different routes to take... we could choose from top of the north island to the whole of the north island and south island. 

Koka Ngaire found out what the kilometre distance between each town would be and each lap that we do in practice is worth 20km of the total distance.

We had to use some maths skills to add up the distances on our route and then we divided by 20 to work out how many laps we had to do each week.  Some of us went a step further and found out how many laps we need to target each time we run.

We are all pretty keen to see how far we will end up running by the time our school cross country comes around in Week 6!

NZ Garden Bird Survey 2018

Today Moana 3 participated in the NZ Garden Bird Survey.  We went out for an hour to count particular birds such as the House Sparrow, Starling, Tui, Fantail, Magpie...

We learnt interesting information about these garden birds before we started and we added some research of our own along the way.  We also created masks of 18 different birds that are commonly found in gardens around NZ.

We sat around the field and while we waited and counted, we also completed some observational drawings of trees and leaves around us.

The survey is completed once a year by all sorts of volunteers and in different settings from homes, parks and schools.  It aims to show the numbers of birds in different areas around NZ and whether they are being affected by predators or not.

If you are interested in completing the survey this week at your place follow the link to... Landcare Research - NZ Garden Bird Survey 2018

Ready for Science Fair!!!

We have had a busy term with our Science focus of 'Eureka - we're about finding out!".

We have all completed lots of science experiments, discussed our results, asked questions, had wonderings, found out interesting facts and displayed our work.

Here is a selection of our science projects that have already made it to school - ready for viewing....

Planes from the Amazon!

By Bjorn

A wee selection of the planes created from descriptions in our shared Chapter Chat book 'The Explorer' by Katherine Rundell.

By Giacomo & Toa

We have come to the end of the story - we loved it and rated it a solid 8.5 out of 10. 

By Daniel P

It has been a very interesting, exciting and informative book where we have learnt lots of new facts about the Amazon Jungle and the creatures that live within it.