The Manaiakalani Network Blogging
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Kia Ora!
Last week we went to Makahika! When we were there we went on the high ropes course, the low ropes course, we made fire and cooked marshmallows, then we did an egg throw. The egg throw was not with real eggs. We were given materials to make a contraption to hold a water balloon. When we dropped the balloon it had to survive.
It was a very good day. Such a hot day and we had so much fun.
Have you ever been to Makahika?
This week is Te Reo Māori language week. In Cybersmart, we learnt about Te reo Māori email etiquette and why it is important to use formal language in our emails.
We were given tips like:
As the teacher, I received an email from Darcie and I am sharing her email. She used lots of Te Reo kupu in her email and followed the tips to good email etiquette. Ka Pai Darcie!
In Room 6, Whaea Michelle has been teaching us to be advocates for native animals, plants and species in Aotearoa.
Here are some facts about the Black Robin.
The Black Robin only had 5 birds left in 1980, all on tiny Tapuaenuku (Little Mangere) Island. If the Department of Conservation (DOC) didn’t step in it would now be extinct. It was one of the most intensive conservation programmes in the world. Thanks to the hard mahi of DOC, there are currently 250-300 birds on two islands.
My question to you is: Have you ever been an advocate for someone or something?
That is the question I will be exploring with my junior Social Studies course. The course is called Better Earth. In this course we explore a range of human rights and environmental challenges. We then go on to ask, “What has or can be done to right these wrongs?”
At the moment we are learning about the different people and events that helped to shape our understanding of what human rights are. I am exploring the creation of the Magna Carta. The reason that I picked this event is because it sounded the most boring to my students and as a result no one else picked to do it.
Through researching this topic I have found that it is not enough to just have words on a document. People in power then need to honour those promises that were made. The Magna Carta has some powerful promises of freedoms, however, these have not always come to fruition.
Now that I have finished my research, I have made a poster with answers to my research questions in my own words. I enjoyed creating the poster in Canva and this allowed me to make a very professional looking design. I am looking forward to seeing what my students come up with for their own desings. Let me know what you think of my design and information. Also feel free to ask any questions that you may have about the Magna Carta.
Room 15 has been exploring different New Zealand Writers. Where they come from, and what kinds of stories they write. We have taken on the Hell Pizza Reading Challenge (reading 7 books to earn a free pizza each week). We then created either a promotional poster, a one-shot-video for a favourite book or a 5-fact poster for an author to inspire others to read and find out more about New Zealand writers and artists.
Click on one of the student blog links (along the side) to find out more about the books and authors everyone explored.
At the moment our class is writing Pick a Path or Choice stories using Google Slides. Below is a video that shows you how they are made. As soon as they are finished they will be posted in individual students blogs.
We are learning to play Table Tennis in Room 3! The video above is to remind us of the rules and encourage us to play at home if we can. If you have any spare bats/ paddles at home that we could use at school – we would really appreciate you sending them in.
Table Tennis is especially great for these wet days when we are stuck inside during break times.
We will post video of the students actually playing next week.
Today is Learning Support Awareness Day. We all wore purple to show our support for the amazing teacher aides we have in our school.
Our Teacher Aides are great because:
-They help us with our learning
-They help us out in the playground
-They help our teachers in the class to make their job a little bit easier
-They are nice are caring
We get to have a disco at lunch time where there will also be some prizes.
Did your class or school do anything for Learning Support Awareness Day.
Mālō e lelei!
As this week is Tongan Language week, we spent some time learning about Ngatu (Tongan Tapa Cloth), including the patterns that are used, and why, the colours and material used. Lots of the inspiration is found in nature or from ancestors.
We then got to make our own small ngatu using shapes, lines and colours in Google Draw. We then used the gradient fill on our shapes to give it some texture.
We noticed in the video and pictures that most of the ngatu used browns and other earthy tones, but that some also had bright colours, so we could use either.
After we had created our own ngatu we took one (or two for some of us) of our designs and copied it over to the class shared ngatu. As this was on a shared Google Drawing, we had to be sure not to delete anyone elses pattern and make sure we did not make copies of things we didn’t need.
Ours isn’t quite finished yet, but here is what we have created so far. What did you do to celebrate Tongan Language Week?
We have been learning how to use Google Drawings to create our own images.
We created ocean pictures and learnt how to change the background, use shapes and lines, change colours in shapes and on borders, and arrange the shapes.
We then learnt what makes a good comment (being positive, thoughtful and helpful) and wrote comments on each others slide.
Do you have a favourite image?
Room 15 has been enjoying Choose Your Own Adventure stories this week.
Mr Malcolm read the book House of Danger to the class and some students played the board game version during chill time.
The class was inspired to create their own stories, after discovering Mr Clark had created one in Google Slides, based on some well-known fairy tale and nursery rhyme characters. They were excited to know they could create crazy, silly, weird and fun stories their friends could “play”, and see if they ended up in all the “bad” endings. Getting eaten, squished or fired from their jobs.
Please explore the student blogs to see which ones have uploaded their stories in progress.
Please leave helpful comments for them to use, to finish the stories or to make them even better!
Mr Clark’s Story
A template slide deck you can use to make your own stories.
These are the T-Shirts we made in Google Drawings showing messages about being kind online.
We explored some different scenarios and looked at how what we say online makes others feel. Even though you are online you should still be interacting with someone like you are face to face. If you wouldn’t say or do it face to face, you shouldn’t do it online. Being behind a screen doesn’t make trash talking ok.
Today, we worked in partners to practice our communication and collaboration skills, which also links in with Smart Relationships.
We learnt how to trust our partner with giving good instructions, or listening to our instructions about where to put the shapes/pictures. Working with our own class made this easier as we already know each other. We had to be very clear with our lefts and rights as when you are looking at screen it is different to being in person.
In the last challenges, we had to draw our own pictures to share, sharing this was harder because we had to describe the shape, the size and the colour. When we are told to ‘make the shape skinnier’ or ‘make the shape longer’ we don’t know by how much.
Overall it was fun, and our communication skills were good.
We also learnt that you can move a picture in front or behind using ctrl + ↑ or ctrl + ↓, it is much easier than arrange; bring to front and or to back.
Today, we worked in partners to practice our communication and collaboration skills, which also links in with Smart Relationships.
We learnt how to trust our partner with giving good instructions, or listening to our instructions about where to put the shapes/pictures. Working with our own class made this easier as we already know each other. We had to be very clear with our lefts and rights as when you are looking at screen it is different to being in person.
In the last challenges, we had to draw our own pictures to share, sharing this was harder because we had to describe the shape, the size and the colour. When we are told to ‘make the shape skinnier’ or ‘make the shape longer’ we don’t know by how much.
Overall it was fun, and our communication skills were good.
We also learnt that you can move a picture in front or behind using ctrl + ↑ or ctrl + ↓, it is much easier than arrange; bring to front and or to back.
Today, we worked in partners to practice our communication and collaboration skills, which also links in with Smart Relationships.
We learnt how to trust our partner with giving good instructions, or listening to our instructions about where to put the shapes/pictures. Working with our own class made this easier as we already know each other. We had to be very clear with our lefts and rights as when you are looking at screen it is different to being in person.
In the last challenges, we had to draw our own pictures to share, sharing this was harder because we had to describe the shape, the size and the colour. When we are told to ‘make the shape skinnier’ or ‘make the shape longer’ we don’t know by how much.
Overall it was fun, and our communication skills were good.
We also learnt that you can move a picture in front or behind using ctrl + ↑ or ctrl + ↓, it is much easier than arrange; bring to front and or to back.
Today, we worked in partners to practice our communication and collaboration skills, which also links in with Smart Relationships.
We learnt how to trust our partner with giving good instructions, or listening to our instructions about where to put the shapes/pictures. Working with our own class made this easier as we already know each other. We had to be very clear with our lefts and rights as when you are looking at screen it is different to being in person.
In the last challenges, we had to draw our own pictures to share, sharing this was harder because we had to describe the shape, the size and the colour. When we are told to ‘make the shape skinnier’ or ‘make the shape longer’ we don’t know by how much.
Overall it was fun, and our communication skills were good.
We also learnt that you can move a picture in front or behind using ctrl + ↑ or ctrl + ↓, it is much easier than arrange; bring to front and or to back.
Our school values are REACH:
Respect
Excellence
Attitude
Cooperation
Honesty
We have designed our own digital badge that could be used for a sticker/REACH voucher. We used Google Drawings to do this, learning a few new tricks like masking shapes and ordering and arranging items.
What are your schools values? Do you have badges?
Hello, kia ora, as salaam alaikum & bonjour,
We are a Year 4 class named Pūkeko from Koputaroa School, which is in Levin, Horowhenua. We love our school!
We also love learning, especially PE, Social Studies, Maths, Writing, Art and much more. Our latest craze is Senet, which is the oldest board game in the world. It was invented in Egypt and we are having a Senet tournament this term.
This blog is a place where we are going to share our learning.
Kia ora, Talofa lava, Malo e leilei we are Kahikatea Class.
We are a year 4 & 5 class at Levin School in Horowhenua, New Zealand.
In our class we are apart of the Manaiakalani community and we use chromebooks to do our work.
We love to go outside and play games. We also love doing dance as well as we get to show off our groovy moves.
We do some awesome learning in our class. We’re really proud of our work such as our writing, maths and reading rotations.
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