Wednesday 28 August 2013

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

Tuesday 27 August 2013

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!

Monday 26 August 2013

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!

Friday 23 August 2013

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.

Friday 16 August 2013

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!

Monday 12 August 2013

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!

Friday 2 August 2013

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.