Wednesday, 13 August 2014

Commonwealth Constructions

Today it was Room 16's turn to research and create a Commonwealth Games stadium.  Our first task was to research images of a chosen sport and mark them up with labels.

(See full slideshow below.)

Next the children worked in teams to construct a stadium venue. It had to contain features they found in their photographs.  As well as the stadium there had to be some kind of connection to other structures - a road, railway, bridge or tunnel.

See all groups in slideshow below.


Each child chose their sport and group members. The "world" was created in advance and a "host"   (i.e. a responsible child familiar with minecraft)  appointed by the teacher. Their job was to manage the team members' construction projects within the "world".

See slideshow of all the stadium constructions below.


There were just a few rules. No sporting events were to be duplicated within a world; no Minecraft weapons were to be drawn (unless an indigenous animal indigenous to the world strayed onto the building site and endangered competitors, officials or media commentators).

Other rules were  too tantalising to leave alone: no spawning unfriendly creatures, no blowing up what other teams were creating, no spawning villagers. (You have to know minecraft to know how disruptive extra villagers can be, let alone the odd stray Endoman.

This project involved (among key skills) measurement, design, incorporating the research data into the final construction.

The class was given a set of Success Criteria. And they were away.






Tuesday, 12 August 2014

RAKSHA BANDHAN

                                   On Sunday, 10th August , it was a special Indian celebration,
                                                       called Raksha Bandhan.
                                  Raksha Bandhan is a special day for Indian brothers and sisters.
                        We are very lucky to have 6 beautiful Indian children in our class this year.
                                         Nandhini, Eesha, Diya, Aryan, Prajay and Armaan.
                                They are all from Fiji, except for Armaan who is from India.
                              HAPPY RAKSHA BANDHAN TO ALL OUR INDIAN FAMILIES.
                               On this special day, the sister ties a string band on her brother's right wrist.
                                                            This band is called a rakhi.
                                    Then the brother promises to take care of his sister and gives her a gift
                                          of Indian sweets, a gift of money or a gift of clothing.
                                                     Here is Armaan with his rakhi on his right wrist.
                                                    It is very beautiful with some beads in the centre.
                                                            Aryan is showing us his rakhi.
                                              He doesn't have a sister so his girl cousin has sent him a rakhi
                                      and she has also sent him a Raksha Bandhan card because she lives                                                                         overseas.
                                  Nandhini tied a rakhi on her wee baby brother.  He didn't want to wear it.
                                                           Eesha tied one on her cousin.
                               We decided to make our own rakhis. We called them friendship
                                bracelets. We used 3 different colours of wool and plaited them.
                              Annabel was an expert at plaiting and she loved helping Alice.
                                                            Thank you Annabel.
                                                    Eesha and Nicole were experts also!


                              So much fun and here are Eesha's and Nicole's rakhis or friendship
                                           bracelets.

Tuesday, 5 August 2014

Soccer coaching in the hall today

                                                                Run Aryan Run!
                                                   Manasa thoroughly enjoyed the game!
                                                    Chelsea soon learned how to dribble.
                                                       Well done Kalanei and Caitlin
                                                       Here is Cruz dribbling the ball.
                                                                 What a lot of fun!
                                        Austin is careful as he dribbles the ball back to his team.



                                                 Room 13 came to play at the same time.
                               

                                                                  Here is our coach.
                                                        He taught us some soccer skills.
                                                     I can see Ezra enjoying these skills.

                                      We had so much fun!

                                       Thankyou Mr.Baker for organising this fun time for us this afternoon.
                                                        We enjoyed learning these soccer skills.

Monday, 4 August 2014

Printing Blocks


A slide show of our printing with Miss France.
           Mr. Maindonald also came to visit us and took photos of our work.

Thursday, 31 July 2014

Room 16 did some very exciting Artwork on Wednesday!


As part of our Art Inquiry we have been studying an artist called Henri Rousseau. 
He enjoys painting animals in their jungle habitat. Ms. France, ( Mrs. M.R.s friend) 
who is a local artist, kindly came to help us do block prints of our animals.


 Ms. France demonstrating our first process..


These are our Learning Intentions.


First we had to chose an animal to sketch and then we transferred this on to cardboard.  To create texture on our cardboard animal shapes we had to choose and apply a variety of materials e.g. sandpaper, string, buttons, wallpaper, gold/silver paper and several other choices.

Here is how effective they look.


Ezra's Red Panda


Cruz's roaring Rhino




Caitlin's big Bear



Diya' s leaping Lion





Kalanei's mischievous Spider Monkey





Nathanael's rhino

Prajay's Monkey



Heads down and hard at work... so enjoyable!


Such concentration!
   We can see Kalanei, Nathanael, Prajay and Eesha.


Look at all the detail on these sketchings.
Chelsea is very proud of her work. 


We had such a lot of fun learning several new processes.
       Here we can see Austin, Alice, Caitlin and Manasa enjoying their work.


We are busy adding colour to our sketchings. We used neocolour pastels.
The pastels blend together to create vibrant colours.


Rose (Yauola's mum), Lisa (Connor's mum) and Brenda (Manasa's mum)
kindly came to help us. They also enjoy doing Art.
Ezra and Nandhini hard at work!


We were very lucky that Mr.Ramadam came to visit us.
He wanted to observe and learn all these new techniques.


Another process we learnt was tracing over our cardboard shape
with 2 different coloured crayons and then applying dye.

 

Finally, we are applying the printing ink to our block cardboard shapes. We are using printing rollers.



Here are our animal prints.
 Don't they look FANTASTIC!
We are very proud of them :) :)

Yauola

 Kalanei

Austin

Symphony

Caitlin

Connor

Nathanael

Aryan

Cruz

Breeze

Zac

Veronica
       
Alice

Manasa

Ezra

Prajay

Nandhini


                  This is  Manasa's finished work after he has added colour with the neo coloured pastels. So effective! I think his new name will have to be 'Manasa Rousseau!'


                       WE HAD SUCH A FUN DAY! WE LOVED DOING PRINTING :)