Hi! Kia Ora! Talofa!

Today we have made a gif about us or things that we like.

First you need a new google slide document.

We need to have 3 slides. Press Control + M twice.

Think about things about you.

At the top if you slide,find insert image, then search the web.

Type in what you want on google images.

Go on each of the 3 pages to do this.

Every page needs one photo about you.

When you have all your photos on the 3 pages you are ready to publish.

Click file, share, publish to web.

Click start slideshow as soon as player loads and restart the slideshow after the last slide.

Click publish.

Click ok

Then click control c, control t and control v

Change 3000 to 500.

Click enter and it should work.

Can you make your own Gif?

This week is Matariki, so because of this we have been learning about the stars.

In our cybersmart lesson, we used Google Draw to create a star (or for our juniors, change an example copy) and add in at least 2 wishes, hopes, dreams or desires for the next year. We thought about how to make sure our dreams were specific and could, hopefully, be reached.

Here are some of our stars.

What did your school do to learn about Matariki?

Hello! Kia Ora! Talofa!

Last month on a Saturday the Southern lights were visible.
Later in the week, we made the Southern light on paper.

We used different materials to make the southern lights. They were pastels, black paper, white paper, and chalk.

We had a lot of fun making them.

Here is the youtube link for how we made them

Can you make it aswell?

Thank you for reading our blog!

From Room 4

Kia ora, welcome, talofa lava,

Our class is called Rata.  We are a Year 5 and 6 class at Levin School, which is located in Levin, Horowhenua in New Zealand’s north island.

Our class enjoy different forms of art, especially drawing.  We often learn through our chromebooks – our favourite site is http://www.timestables.co.nz.  We are currently learning through a creatives project about our school carvings, focussing on tuna and atua.  We love playing outdoor games and sports, especially touch and soccer.  When we have a spare 5 minutes we love playing Wink Murderer and Paper, Scissors, Rocks with our friends.

We have been exploring how to use the iPad camera over the last few weeks. Today we looked at all the features of the mark up tool as we added some details to the photo of our own face. Today we are having a fun run at school and so we added colours to match our Whanāu Kura Group. There are so many different things to draw with in the mark up tool: pencil, pen, highlighter, crayon, calligraphy pen, watercolours to name a few.

What is your favourite tool?

This week with Whaea Michelle we explored how to use the different line tools in Google Drawings, in particular the Polyline tool, to create Samoan inspired patterns.

The Polyline tool can be a bit tricky to get used to – but basically if you click then drag and click then drag till you have closed up the shape you can make many different straight sided shapes. The Curve line works similarly, creating a curve where you click.

We found inspiration for our ideas by using Google Search to narrow down to images of Samoan Patterns where the usage rights were permitting us to use them with Creative Commons licences.  We then used our inspiration image to re-create the pattern.

Here is Cooper’s creation with the inspiration image alongside it.

And here is Leighton’s.

Can you tell how they managed to get each shape looking the same?

This week, as it is Samoan Language Week, we drew inspiration from Mrs Tele’a’s Cybersmart Challenge to create Samoan patterns on Google Draw.

For some of us, our juniors in particular, this was the first time that we had used Google Draw, so instead of making patterns we just learnt how to add shapes and lines and change colours.

We liked being able to use the hex codes provided in the Cybersmart Challenge to help us with our colours. If you haven’t checked out the Samoan Language Cybersmart Challenge you should. You can find it here.

We liked being creative using Google Draw. It’s also lots of fun!

Have you used Google Draw before? What is your favourite tool on Google Draw?

Here is some of our work – they aren’t all finished, but we would still love some feedback.

This week, the rest of our class got to have a go at using Scratch Junior to animate our names. Check out our video below.

One of our Tuhi Mai Tuhi Atu Classes – Team Koru from Glen Taylor School had a post up a few weeks ago about using Explain Everything to create dinosaurs with their heads. We really liked that idea and wanted to do one similar, but because we use Chromebooks and not iPads we had to do it slightly different.

Today, we got to create a creature on Google Drawings using either the polyline (which is still a bit tricky for some of us) or lots of shapes together to create a creature of our choice.

We then took a picture of just our heads and used remove.bg to remove the background and anything extra that was still in the picture. Finally, we put this picture onto the head of our creature. It was really fun. We hope you enjoy them!

Today we learnt:

• We can see our History on our Chromebooks by clicking on Control + H or going into the skinny snowman, we leave a footprint and trail where ever we click!
• Using Control + K you can create a link
• Using Control + D duplicates what you have selected
• Using Alt + arrow keys rotates objects and images, or the drag the dot above the selected item around
• Control + L selects a link
• If you need to undo something click Control + Z
• To screen capture use Control + Shift plus windows key OR click on the time in the right hand corner and then click on Screen Capture.

We wonder …

If we leave footprints when we go to different websites, would it make a new footprint when we go back to the same site?

What do you think?

This term our inquiry topic is space.  We have been reading a lot about the sun and different planets.

This week we read about Mercury, Venus and Earth.  We learnt that these are the closest planets to the sun.  Venus is the hottest even though Mercury is closer!  Earth is the “Goldilocks” planet because it is not too hot or not too cold (just right for us).

After we read, we created some super cool canva creations.  We had to make sure the planets were in the correct order and showed the correct size comparison.

Below is Lylah’s Canva Creation.

Canva Digital Art Instructions

Kia ora, Hello, Goedemorgen, Bula Vinaka and welcome to Awhi Rito!

Awhi Rito means to embrace, care for or nurture each other and the younger students in our school. We named ourselves this year because Mrs Shuker was new to our school this year and we wanted to something new to show who we are. When we discussed coming up with our name we thought about the flax bush and how we protect the younger students, but we still have people who are older than us andprotect us. We are showing that we are good role models.

In Awhi Rito we have 2 teachers – Mrs Shuker who teaches us 4 days a week and Ms Logan (who is also the principal) teaches us on a Wednesday.

Mrs Shuker does a fun game with us called Monster Maths, where we have to get crowns and gems to go on our monster by answering basic facts. We use typing club, prototech, mathletics, lexia and epic to help enhance our learning. While we work, we are allowed to listen to music. On Mondays we have Hui Ata in the morning where we sing waiata and do karakia as a school, but we do this as a class every day.

Our school isa country school, so we have lots of unique things that make us us, and some things that other schools don’t have. One thing that we have is an Ag Day. For this we get the chance todo lots of arts and crafts as well as bring in baby lambs, calves or kids that we have been looking after for judging. Our school also has school chickens and a school vege garden.

We have lots of fields that we play a range of sports on, and recently got some brand new football goals which we enjoy using. We have a tennis court and 2 playgrounds. We also have 2 forests, we are only allowed to play in one since the other is too overgrown. We are also allowed to climb some of our trees. We have a bike track that we are allowed to use any day of the week as long as we bring a helmet.

Please ask us any questions you would like to know about us. We look forward to hearing from you!

This week, as we have some students new to our class, we went over our Kawa of Care and how to access the Camera App. We built on our learning about how to take landscape photos from last session, and found out the best way to hold our iPad so that we could take portrait photos.

Whaea Michelle reminded us that tall things are good to photograph in a Portrait orientation and long things in a Landscape orientation.

Here is a portrait photo of Mr D after he had read us the book he wrote and had published – “Grandpa’s Beard”. It was so exciting to hear all about how he went about creating this. We know a real life published author!

This week in Room 15 we have been learning about how we are all SMART in different ways. These aren’t limited to people who are good at reading, writing or maths skills.

The eight different ways people can be SMART are: People (Interpersonal), Body (Kinaesthetic), Word (Linguistic), Self (Intrapersonal), Picture (Visual/Spacial), Nature (Environmental), Musical, Number (Logic) Smart.

We answered a short quiz to figure out what elements of each SMART area we were, and worked out the main categories we most identified with. You can be more than one category, and many of us were up to 3 or 4 categories. Our adults Mr Malcolm, Whaea Sally and Whaea Amanda also completed the quiz to see how different we all are.

Mr Malcolm then created some visual charts to show the different areas are represented across our whole group.

We created Character Profile Sheets and researched famous people and careers that goes with each SMART category, then we personalised them to show how we are each different. We printed them out for the class wall and for our blogs.

What kind of SMART category do you most identify with?

What are some kinds of ways of doing or activities help you to learn best?

This week we bgan to look at what all the different keys on our chromebook keyboard are and what they do.

A chromebook keyboard is a little different from other computer keyboards.

Did you know on a chromebook there are key to refresh your page and jump forward and backwards in your browser – these aren’t on other keyboards!

We are diving into finding out how we can use keyboard shortcuts next week.

At the end of last term we read a chapter of David Walliams book – The World’s Worst Teachers.

Last week we were working on how to generate ideas for writing by using different ways to plan our writing.  We reflected back to World’s Worst Teachers and began planning a character description of our own version of a terrible teacher.

First we used a digital planner, then we used our plan to create our teacher.  Our character description needed to include what the teacher looked liked, how they acted and why they were so mean (a back story).

How do you like to plan your writing?

Here Levi’s writing.

May is Music Month in New Zealand. It is a special month to promote New Zealand’s musical performers.

Below is a simple poster explaining why Music Month is so important. It is themed black and pink, because that was the colours of 2023’s music month, and it is also very eye-catching.

Room 15 have also included their favourite songs within the slide-deck. We will add the linkslater  to any Youtube videos for our songs, when we can find them. Slide 2 needs to be adjusted to make sure all of our songs can be seen.

What is your favourite song or songs?

Do they change depending on your mood?

Do you have a favourite genre (type) of music?

Do you have a favourite music video?

Have you ever been to a music concert?

Bonjour blog Readers.

This week Kea class has done art based on Anzac day. We did a silhouette with a sunrise for the background and a soldier or a group of soldiers for the silhouette part. We got to choose what soldier we wanted and what we wanted to use to make our background. We could use watercolor paint, watercolor pencils, crayons or pastels. All of our backgrounds looked so unique. Even when people did try copying their friends’ designs they still came out so different. 

By Hayley

This week we learnt how to write a post about our learning. We had a go creating a collage using a site called LunaPic.

We found out that our posts needed to describe not only what it was we were sharing, but what we learnt, liked about it or found hard, and possibly even a question to engage the reader.

Here is Key’s  and Joshua’s post. How do you think they did?

This week we learnt how to write a post about our learning. We had a go creating a collage using a site called LunaPic.

We found out that our posts needed to describe not only what it was we were sharing, but what we learnt, liked about it or found hard, and possibly even a question to engage the reader.

Here is Key’s  and Joshua’s post. How do you think they did?