Thepipbuzz

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 ...

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!

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!

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