Walking the Talk

This morning, as Mrs Graham walked to school, she noticed the grass berm all along her street was covered with styrofoam balls - the type you get in beanbags.  They were so thick that it looked as if there had been a recent hailstorm.  What was most disturbing though, was that the weather forecast for heavy rain and all of those balls would end up in the stormwater drains - some already had.

Because this street is so close to our school and we have been learning so much about the dangers of rubbish getting into stormwater drains, we decided to do some community service and get out there and pick up as much of it as possible.

We had just 30 minutes to make as much of a difference as possible.  This photo does not even show all of what we picked up.  The worst part is that we couldn't get it all either.  There is still so much we had to leave behind.

We are proud though that we were able to take our learning out into the local community, and for some fish we did make a difference!

Our Song for Camp MERC

Check out this catchy tune!  This is one of the songs that we have written to give to Camp MERC to help build their environmental programme.  The song lyrics were composed by our students, the intruments were played by out students and all of the actions were developed by them too.  We think they've done a wonderful job of writing a tune that will get stuck in your head and promote this very important message.

Coastal Clean-Up

Yesterday Rooms 20 and 22 went on a trip to the Rotary Walkway in Pakuranga.  We decided that since we had been busy making resources to teach others about marine conservation, it would be approapriate to do as we say and take some action as well.

We teamed up with Ryley from Sustainable Coastlines once again to undertake a cleanup of the Tamaki Estuary.  This stretch of water has been identified as one of the dirtiest in Auckland.  On arriving there you wouldn't have believed it.  On a beautiful day, the waterway looked clean and inviting so we were a little worried that we might not find any rubbish at all.

How wrong we were!  In 1 hour, in one small bay, we managed to fill four 50L bags with rubbish.  We found glass, bricks, someone's dinner plate, a door mat, rolls of sticky tape, discarded bags of dog poo (What's the point of going to the effort of picking it up and wrapping it in plastic just to leave it there???) and so many plastic bottletops.  This was exciting for us because we had been learning about how plastics photo-degrade.  We actually found evidence of this. See the video below:

What was really concerning though was just how much evidence we were finding. This plastic must have been in the waterway for at least 6 years for it to have photodegraded like this.  The bigger problem that this causes is that when it shatters, the tiny pieces look like food to many marine animals.

We also found nurdles - small plastic pellets that are the base product of most plastic items.  These tiny pellets look just like fish eggs and make a toxic meal for a hungry fish.  Around the high-tide mark, we found hundreds.  Apparently they enter the river as waste from the plastic processing factories that line the river.

Nurdles with paper clip for size comparison

After stopping for morning tea, we cleaned a second bay and ended up with eight bags of rubbish.  We could have gone on for much longer - there was so much that we just had to leave behind as we ran out of time.  It really does make you think about where our rubbish ends up.  One of the best spots for us was near the stormwater outlet - so much of our rubbish enters the waterway here.  That was really obvious to us!

In the afternoon, we did some activities on the beach.  Each group marked out one square metre and sampled the various organic and inorganic items in our area.  We are hoping to use this data to be able to make an estimate of how much rubbish is washing up on our beaches.

Ryley commented and said,

"It was a pleasure working with a group of students that showed such genuine enthusiasm and interest in learning about coastal protection."  

Room 20 and Room 22 should be very proud of the contribution they have made to marine conservation.  We walked the walk!

P.S. This weekend, on Saturday 21 September, is International Coastal Clean-Up Day.  What will you do to help?

Happy Shark Week Everyone!

Everyone in Room 20 knows that Mrs Graham loves Great White Sharks so there is often talk about sharks in our classroom - whether it be sharing funny photos like these:

reading the "Gilbert the Great" series of books (highly recommend - they're in our library!!!), 

being inspired by shark attack survivor Bethany Hamilton,

 or discussing the poster about shark finning that hangs on our wall.  Did you know 190 sharks die from finning EVERY MINUTE worldwide.  What a tragedy!  

One of our favourite things to do though is to check in with the Ocearch Shark Tracker.  This is an awesome site where you can see the actual migrations of Great White Sharks in South Africa and America.  Ocearch is a research group that tags the sharks with satellite transmitters to allow us to obtain better information about these endangered species.  Check it out here: http://sharks-ocearch.verite.com/

We are doing our bit to help encourage people to change their attitudes towards these magnificent creatures.  Check out the tracker and learn a little bit about the sharks.  It's fascinating!

Mathletics Class of the Week

We did it again!  Room 20 has been named the Mathletics Class of the Week and have earned the right to display the trophy in our class for the next fortnight.

We can credit much of this achievement to Catherine, who managed to reach 9th in the world (Thanks for letting me know to correct this Catherine!!!) by earning over 10 000 points in one day alone!  What a fantastic achievement!

Well done Room 20!  How long do you think we can keep it up?

Did You Ever?

In Room 20 we have been writing poems around the theme Did You Ever?  These poems are so simple to write, yet so effective in their message.  The basic structure is as follows:

• Begin with a Did You Ever ... question
• The next three lines describe the experience following the pattern: noun verb+ing
• End with a comment or recommendation

Play the slideshow to read our poems.  Have you ever experienced these things?

Maths Olympiad

Well today was the day of the 2013 Maths Olympiad.  Room 20 has been busy having a go at practice questions over the last week and a bit and we were hoping that it would pay off today.

At Elm Park, we have a Maths Olympiad Challenge each year.  It is a bit like a team problem solving relay.  Each class enters two teams who have 30 minutes to answer 20 questions.

Room 20 was represented by Anahita, Zhaoyu, Hubert and Lee (Team 1) and Maddison, Catherine, Louis and Charlie (Team 2).

The competition was fierce.  All teams got stuck on questions 2 and for a long time there was not a lot of movement on the points table.  At this point many teams opted to pass, but Team 2 stuck with it and was one of only two teams to solve the question correctly!

But it was Team 1's day.  Once they had gotten past that small hurdle they were away and eventually took out the title!  Congratulations team!  You were fantastic representatives for Room 20.

The four winners will have their names engraved on the Elm Park Maths Olympiad Trophy, and will go on to represent Elm Park at the Mathex Competition later in the year.

Team 1: Anahita, Lee, Hubert, Zhaoyu

Team 2: Charlie, Catherine, Maddi and Louis

 Room 20 supporting our teams

Today was also the day for the Teacher's Maths Olympiad where teachers put themselves in the students shoes and race to solve maths problems.  There were four teams including Mrs Graham's "Divide and Conquer" team.   Unfortunately  "Divide and Conquer" didn't manage to conquer coming in second to Mrs Walker's "Colourful Calculators".  The pace was frenetic but it was lots of fun.

Divide and Conquer

Anahita the Speechmaker

Tonight, our classmate, Anahita, represented Elm Park School at the Zone Speech Finals, with her speech about Child Labour.

All senior students at Elm Park (and surrounding schools) have been writing and delivering speeches in their classes over the course of this term.  Finalists were chosen to represent their classes at the school Speech Finals.  Room 20 was represented by Anahita, Ashleigh with her speech on Movie Magic, and Sophia with her speech on Brothers and Sisters.

The speeches varied from humorous accounts of life to information about serious world issues.  All finalists did their classes proud.  In the end, Anahita was chosen.

At the Zone Speech Finals, Anahita competed against finalists from other local schools.  The judges commended her on her delivery skills - excellent volume and natural gestures and expression.

After they had deliberated, the judges announced Anahita as third-place.  Congratulations Anahita!  We are so proud of you for representing Elm Park so well.

P.S. A tip from the judges for all speechmakers - Don't underestimate the impact of a great introduction and conclusion.  Grab your audience witha  punchy beginning and make sure you round up your speech and leave them with something to remember!

Project Aware

Check out this infographic about the damage marine rubbish is doing.  It definitely makes us realise how important it is to get our message from our Inquiry learning this year out into the wider community.  Check out www.projectaware.org to read about the work that scuba divers are doing to address this problem.

We are working hard on our projects to help Camp MERC enhance the marine conservation aspect of their programme.  So far, with Room 22, we have designed a slogan and are in the process of writing a song and creating a bottletop mural.  Room 22 is working hard on creating resources that school groups can use before and after their visit to MERC and our class is writing environmental scenarios to introduce each of the team building activities that groups participate in at the beginning of their visit.

Everything is coming together well and we are excited that we will be going back out to Camp MERC early in Term 4 to present our creations.  We'll post some images of our work soon!

Hoshino Gakuen Visit to Elm Park

This week, it was time for the annual visit by students from Hoshino Gakuen - a primary school in Japan.  This was the third time the students have visited our school and we were looking forward to meeting some new friends from another country.

The Hoshino students were welcomed to Elm Park School with a pōwhiri at the beginning of the day.  They performed the Japanese version of "It's a Small World" and our Elm Park students performed Underneath the Orange Tree - a traditional Japanese song.  We sang most of it in English, but we learned one of the verses in Japanese.  It was tricky but it sounded amazing.

After the pōwhiri, the Japanese students helped us to learn some Japanese games, calligraphy skills, origami and language.  We were all able to take away a small souvenir of Japanese culture.  After some morning tea, it was their turn to learn about our culture.

We brought the students back to our classrooms and helped them to make a kiwiana artpiece.  One of the Japanese students, Kensuke, was amazed to discover that our current class novel is Kensuke's Kingdom by Michael Morpurgo.  He thought that was awesome!


We finished off our session by teaching the students a simple song with rakau sticks.  They picked it up so quickly.

It was a flying visit - nowhere near long enough in our opinion!  The Hoshino students only flew into NZ the night before and they were gone again by lunchtime.  After leaving our school, they drove down to Rotorua for a 3-day farmstay, and then flew back to Japan.

We hope they enjoyed their time with us.  We are looking forward to writing to our buddies and learning more about their culture.

Listen Up!

This week we had some visitors from Kings College come to speak to us about protecting our hearing.
The girls presented some fantastic experiments to help us really understand how easily we can damage our ears.

We even got to test a decibel meter to see how loud our class is when we are working.  Thankfully we have learnt that as long as we use normal talking voices and not raised voices, we stay in the safe zone. That's great motivation for keeping the noise level down!

If you are exposed to noise that may be over the safe limit of 85dB, there are three actions you can take.  They are:

The Kings' College students ran this workshop as part of a community service program that runs at their school.  They did an amazing job of presenting - like professionals.  Thanks girls - we learnt heaps!

Making Sandwiches You Can't Eat!

Our Buddy Class, Room 5, is learning about healthy eating for their Inquiry topic.  They have been doing some writing about how to make a healthy sandwich.

We decided that for our Buddy Class visit last week, we would help them publish their writing by animating a sandwich.  We used Keynote to do this for a couple of reasons - we wanted to learn how to use the build function to make our future slideshows more interesting, and Keynote also lets you record a voiceover for the slideshow (something Google Presentation won't!)  Keynote also has the Instant Alpha tool that lets you remove the background from images.  That was especially useful for this task.

Check out one of our animations of "How to make a Healthy Sandwich".

We still have to play with getting the timings right but it's not bad for a first attempt is it?  We are planning on using our new skills to share some of our own learning soon.  Keep an eye out!

Statistics with Google Forms and Spreadsheets

To kick off this term in Maths, we have been exploring the Statistical Inquiry Cycle.  We began by finding out where we had all travelled over the holidays.  We gathered the data using post-it notes and then grouped them into the categories: Overseas, Within NZ, Within Auckland.

We discussed how arranging the post-its into lines and forming a bar graph of sorts made it so much easier to quickly make meaning of the information.

We then learnt how to graph using Google Spreadsheet.  Fun!  See our example graph below:



Then it was our turn to have a go for ourselves.  We had to each develop a question to investigate.  We worked in small groups to create a Google form to survey our classmates.  Once the data was collected, we again sorted the data into meaningful categories so that we could play with the many options for graphing that Google Spreadsheet offers.

Look in our individual blogs to see our questions and the resulting graphs.  It was a really cool way to learn about graphing and statistics.

In the News...

Have a look at who was in the local newspaper this week!  Click here to read the article in the Eastern Courier about our Facetime with England. Looking good boys!

Marshmallow Maths

For the last week of the term we decided to have some fun with our Maths and do an investigation into Volume, Mass and Temperature.  What did we use to investigate these concepts?...

Marshmallows!! 

Maths has never been so tasty.  Check out some of our learning below:

We finished off our investigations with some hard-earned hot chocolate.
Who said Maths wasn't fun???

FaceTime with our Namesake School

This morning, Room 20 and Room 16 hosted a FaceTime conversation with students from Elm Park Primary School in Essex, England.

Our two schools made contact for the first time last year after discovering we share the same name.  The students from Essex held a sleepover specifically so they could chat with us (there is a 13 hour time difference!) and learn a little bit about how kids on the other side of the world live.

We had a fabulous time talking with our new friends.  They were interested to know what the weather was like and whether NZ was a great place to live.  We performed a Haka for them (they were so impressed!) and sang Paradise as well.

We also found that we had many similarities.  The English girls enjoy singing the "Cups" song from the movie "Pitch Perfect" - also one of our favourites!  Even our school logos are similar - made up of people in a circle holding hands.  Check it out:

Elm Park, Essex                         Elm Park, Pakuranga

Our FaceTime meeting will hopefully be appearing in local newspapers soon.  A reporter from the Eastern Courier came along to see what was happening and is planning an article about us in the near future.  Keep an eye out!

We are keen to catch up with our fellow Elm Park-ers soon.  In Term 3 we are planning to hold our own sleepover so we can connect again.  We can't wait!

Celebrating Māori Language Week

This year's theme for Māori Language Week was Māori Place Names.  Room 20 investigated some of our cities Māori names and their meanings.  See what we have learnt:

Where in the World is Mr Fitz?

Room 20 is having a heap of fun tracking Mr Fitz (one of our teachers from last year) while he travels around the world.

Mr Fitz has been travelling through Central America for the last 2 months.  In Guatemala, he was lucky enough to be able to visit a local school and send us some photos of what school is like there.  Very different from here! The teachers wear uniforms (and pink ones at that!!) and there are bars on the windows.  It makes us appreciate our own school so much more.

Sometimes, instead of an update, he will send us clues and we have to figure out where he's been.  It has been the coolest way to learn about some amazing countries like El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Mexico and Honduras.

For our homework this week, we decided to share the information that we've found out about these countries.  Check out some of our presentations below:

I wonder where we will find Mr Fitz next...

WordFoto with Bridge to Terabithia

Today we wrapped up our novel study on Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Patterson.  We have been focussing on the characters in the story - what are they like, how they have transformed over the course of the story and what was their purpose.

This afternoon we had a play with a new app called WordFoto to share some of our learning.  We have created these cool pictures of the characters using the words that describe them.

 We have really enjoyed reading this story. We were able to relate to the story and make many connections.  Have your read it?  We highly recommend it!

Tonal Landscapes

Our student teacher, Mrs Paton, has been teaching us about tints and tones using paint.  We have created these amazing landscapes.

We started with the 'true' colour in the middle of the page and then gradually added more white as we moved up the page.  Once we had reached the top, we then returned to the true colour and worked our way down the page, this time adding black.  We learnt that a tiny bit of black goes a long way - you don't need to add much to make the colour darker.  Some of the other things we had to consider were:

• not making the pencil lines too dark (otherwise you can see them through the paint; and
• making sure we mixed enough of each tint or tone. 

These artworks look absolutely stunning on the walls of our classroom.  Thank you Mrs Paton for teaching us these skills.  It has been fun!

Sustainable Coastlines

As part of our Enterprise Inquiry, we are helping Camp MERC to design the environmental aspect of their programme.  To be able to do this, we need to fully understand the message they want to communicate - about how much damage rubbish is doing to marine life.

Last week we were lucky enough to have Ryley Webster from Sustainable Coastlines come and talk to us about issues facing marine animals.

In this photo you can see Ryley talking to us about gyres - the massive rubbish islands that are caused by the rubbish being caught and collected in ocean currents.  The white patches on the map that he is showing us are the gyres.  What's really surprising is that some of these are in the middle of the ocean - far away from any land. It's very sad.

We talked about what actions we can take on an individual level to make a difference.  Some ideas are:

• Make sure your own rubbish is disposed of carefully
• Try to buy things that are not packaged - the less plastic we use, the less needs to be produced
• Don't walk past litter - pick it up!  It's everyone's problem, not just the owner of the rubbish
• Share the message with other people

We also learned a lot of new vocabulary to explain the problem.  Here are some of the words we learned:

Photodegrade

where somehing is broken down by light from the sun

Biodegrade

where something breaks down by natural processes

Nurdles

the tiny plastic beads that are the base product for most plastic items

Bio-accumulate

Sustainable Coastlines are in the process of creating resources about marine conservation that will be distributed to Primary and Intermediate schools around the country.  It was great to have Ryley along to support us and we will hopefully get to work with his organisation again as we go through our Inquiry.

Fun with our Buddy Classes!

Room 20 certainly is a popular class.  We have not one, but three different buddy classes that we are currently working with.

Room 5 is a Year 1 class.  We have been working with them this term, helping them to publish their writing on the iPads.  Check out the post and photos on their class blog explaining what we did.

http://room5eps2013.blogspot.co.nz/2013/06/creating-stories-on-ipads.html

We have also been working with Room 16 - a Year 4 class.  Our two classrooms are the only two in the school who are using Blogger for our e-Portfolios, so we are learning together.  We also decided to get together to celebrate Matariki - the Maori New Year.  We made flax stars, learnt how to play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star on the Boomwhackers (and sing the words in Te Reo!) and set new goals for the New Year.  It was a fantastic afternoon.  Read all about it here:

http://room16eps2013.blogspot.co.nz/2013/06/matariki-workshops.html

 

Room 16 is also giving us a run for our money at the Class Mathletics trophy.  We shared the award for Weeks 4 and 5, and then Room 16 won it outright for Weeks 6 and 7.  Look out Room 16!  We're on a mission to win it back!!

Our third buddy class this year is another Year 6 class - Room 22.  We are working together on our Enterprise Inquiry.  Keep checking back for some more information about this which we will post soon.

We are really lucky to be able to work with so many other students in our school.  It really does make learning so much more fun!

Monet's Gardens

This term we have been learning about painting skills during Art.  We have been focussing on painting in the style of Claude Monet, the famous impressionist artist.  Thanks to the fabulous art blog, Mrs Picasso's Classroom, we have been able to create some amazing art using a similar style.

We had to learn a number of different techniques to create these pieces.  The first step involved masking off the fence so we could later peel it off and leave a negative outline.

To create the grass, bushes and path we used a sponge to apply the paint.  We had to be careful not to use too much paint and to hop the sponge across the page.

The sky was created using the drag technique.  We loaded a piece of cardboard with a mixture of dark blue, light blue and white paint and then slowly dragged it across the page, letting the colours mix as it happened.

The wildflowers were created using the wooden end of the brush, while the pond and waterlillies were brushed on.  Again, instead of pre-mixing the paint, we picked up a little of each colour and let the colours mix as they were brushed on.

The most exciting part was of course peeling off the masking tape.  Unfortunately some of the rolls of tape we had used were a little old so they tore some parts of the paper - but that just created some extra texture on the fence.  Bonus!

This was a fabulous art project and we are so proud of the end results.  What do you think?

World Oceans Day

Today is World Oceans Day.  This is important to Room 20 because this year, we are working with Room 22 and Camp MERC to educate people about the effect of rubbish on marine life.  For our Enterprise Inquiry, we are in the process of designing an activity that could be built into MERC's programme to help visitors appreciate the magnificent marine reserve at their doorstep.

Earlier this year we visited MERC for our Year 6 camp.  It was an amazing experience where we all learnt a lot about overcoming challenges and teamwork.  While we were there we heard about a place called Midway Island where there are some horrendous things happening as a direct results of humans dropping litter.  Watch this video and see for yourself:

Incredible isn't it?  We are looking forward to doing what we can to make a difference.

Hook, Line and Singalong

Here is Room 20 signing "Paradise" at the Hook, Line and Sing-a-long Assembly.

On Friday 31 May, schools around New Zealand all participated in a 1-hour singalong.  At our school, we had a whole school assembly and sang some of our school favourites.  Our choir sang "Hareruia", the famous Hallelujah in Maori and it was absolutely fantastic.  We have decided that we will learn this song as a whole school as well.

The assembly finished with "Paradise" -  the Youth song for New Zealand Music Month.  Room 20 had the huge pleasure of leading the school in the signing version.  We have loved learning this song and the extra challenge of the sign language has been lots of fun.  Maybe a new challenge might be for us to learn to sign the National Anthem.  What do you think?

What a Week!

Room 20 has capped off a brilliant start to Term 2 by winning an amazing 3 awards at Assembly this afternoon - Zero Waste Wally, Baby Shrek and the Mathletics Class Award.

Elm Park School is an Enviroschool and at each Assembly, we recognise the classes that are contributing in positive ways to the environment.  Zero Waste Wally will be visting our classroom for the next couple of weeks to see how great we are at turning off lights to conserve energy.  

Baby Shrek is awarded to the class with the best behaviour at Assembly.  Room 20 did an outstanding job and we were surprised and excited to win the award.

But the award that was the most special for us was the Mathletics Class Award.  At the beginning of this term, we set ourselves a class goal that at some point this term, we would win the Mathletics trophy.  To achieve this, we would have to work together - everyone had to play their part and work towards gaining bronze certificates.  Every morning, we tally up the bronze certificates earned, the total class points and also who our top Mathletes are.  This has been so motivating.  We went over to Assembly knowing we had a good chance, but we just didn't know how the other classes had been doing.  When we heard that 3rd place had earned 25 certificates, we knew we were in the top two.  Second place - 33 certificates.  We knew our tally was 41.  We had done it!  This has been a real team effort and we took the award after earning over 100 000 points over the past 3 weeks.  We were so proud of this because we had worked so hard.  

Our next challenge is to see if we can all earn a gold certificate by the end of the year.  26 weeks left - it's entirely possible...

Our fourth celebration at Assembly today was that our classmate, Anahita, was named Head Girl for 2013.  Congratulations to you Anahita!  We are all so proud of you.

What a week in Room 20!  We are looking forward to seeing how much more we can achieve over the term.

Learning Sign Language

This week is New Zealand Sign Language Week and Deaf Aotearoa has issued the challenge for every New Zealander to learn 25 signs.  Room 20 accepted this challenge for our homework task this week.  We decided to start by learning the finger-spelling alphabet - that's 26 signs already!  Then we really got inspired.  We used the Online Dictionary of Sign Language and learned how to sign words that we find useful or interesting.  Some of us have mastered up to 40 signs!  We have even begun learning how to sign this amazing song, Paradise by Waimarie Smith.  What a gorgeous interpretation of New Zealand.  Have a listen and learn some of the signs below:

Welcome!

Hi there

Welcome to Room 20's 2013 blog.  This is a place where we will share the learning and events happening in our classroom.  We are excited that you will be sharing our journey with us.

We are a class of Year 6 students based at Elm Park School in Auckland New Zealand.  This year we are planning on taking the blogging world by storm!  Each and every student in our class has their own blog, on which to share their personal learning stories.  Click on the links at the right to see their work.  We are looking forward to seeing how widely viewed our blogs will become.

Please check back regularly, view our work, and leave us comments.  We love feedback and are looking forward to hearing from you.

Room 20